The two short pieces of plainchant are sung with an appropriate quiet devotional fervour, the distance of the recording reinforcing a somewhat monastic quality, but the sound quality Chanticleer employ for the other pieces on the disc is fascinatingly varied. Cornysh’s Ave Maria is given a forthright, strident treatment which does not always convince me (the falsettists in particular producing at times a rather pinched tone), but Taverner’s Te Deum, by contrast, is given a performance of the utmost suavity and control which brings out every nuance of a very fine work indeed. It is also remarkable for the balance between all the voice parts, and while I am not always convinced by Chanticleer’s tuning, the attention paid to the contrapuntal detail which their soft-grained sound allows to shine through makes this a commanding performance.
Monteverdi’s two madrigals Era l’anima mia and Dorinda, ah diro mia, as rendered sacred by Aquilino Coppini’s Latin texts, lose none of their force: it would have been interesting to place the original texts side by side with the contrafacta in the booklet in order to appreciate exactly how the two correspond to each other in relation to musical effect. The plangent final moments of the first of these elicits some particularly fine singing from Chanticleer (an ‘orchestra of voices’ indeed), though once more the tuning seems somewhat shaky when the outer vocal limits of the work are reached.
The other remarkable achievement of this anthology is the inclusion of two of Olga Doskaya’s transcriptions of 12-part sacred concertos by Vasily Titov. These are highly impressive pieces reflecting all the splendour of the Russian imperial chapel and provide, additionally, an Orthodox perspective on the disc’s theme of the Mother of God. An inspired recording.'