This is a highly attractive and innovative programme of a cappella choral music which also makes use of solo instruments. The Swedish Chamber Choir, a beautifully honed sound with a versatile tessitura (and excellent English!), are directed by Simon Phipps, who brings a sympathetic set of interpretations to much of this inwardly melancholy repertoire. There is a clean edge to the choir’s intonation which lends itself to the meditative hues of Vaughan Williams’s early Rest, the more experimental Three Shakespeare Songs of 1951 (especially the sonorous ‘The cloud-capp’d towers’ with its sinister ending), Stanford’s immutable The Blue Bird and Judith Bingham’s menacing The Drowned Lovers (with its Stanford paraphrases). This British repertoire sits well with the appealing Swedish repertoire of Stenhammer’s Three Choral Songs (which are important settings of Jacobsen – the second is worth comparing with Delius’s solo setting of 1896), Alfvén’s two folk-song arrangements of 1923 and Wikander’s Kung Liljekonvalje of 1919, all of which deserve to be better known and more widely sung.

The centrepiece of the recording (from which it evidently takes its name) is the arrangement by Paul Drayton of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending for violin and chamber choir. At first I had my doubts about whether such an arrangement could work, since there are numerous features of Vaughan Williams’s score – certain orchestral sonorities, long sustained chords (such as the one which accompanies the first violin cadenza), and some tricky passagework – yet these are excellently negotiated to support Jennifer Pike’s perceptive reading of the solo violin part in what is a surprisingly convincing and warm representation of the work. I also much enjoyed the Nordic postlude of Gjeilo’s Serenity (a setting of the well-known Christmas text ‘O magnum mysterium’) with its numinous counterpoint for the violin, and the velvet tone of Maria Forsström in Gottwald’s 16-voice arrangement of Mahler’s valedictory ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’. Again, the control, balance and intonation of the choir in this slow-moving harmonic world is admirable and makes one hope that Phipps and the SCC will do more of this rewarding repertoire.