‘Morning Star’ follows where 2019’s ‘Christmas’ (12/19) led – a festive release of a distinctly grown-up sort, this time taking Epiphany as its theme. The Three Kings brought gifts, and the vocal ensemble arrive laden in turn with armfuls of curious and unexpected offerings, all performed with meticulous care and musicality.

Musical gold is in particularly generous supply. It glows from Pierre de Manchicourt’s Illuminare, Jerusalem, text flickering in brilliant strands of imitative polyphony, intricately woven together here: vertical clarity never sacrificed to horizontal direction. It radiates from the swelling ebb and flow of Lassus’s Tribus miraculis and Josh Cooter’s solo Omnes de Saba (the quality of the plainchant singing throughout is exemplary), as well as from Park’s own O send out thy light, close-set chords engulfing the ear in thick warmth – a contrast to the more diffuse softness of Joanna Marsh’s In winter’s house.

The spice of frankincense comes courtesy of Judith Bingham’s anthem In Mary’s love, pungent with harmonic interest and episodic invention. I’m not sure Howells’s lovely Here is the little door gains from an all-male ensemble. Something about the text – its insistence on the small, the fragile, the innocent – demands sopranos or trebles, but Peter Cornelius’s The Three Kings makes a lot of sense for these forces in Park’s arrangement-of-an-arrangement.

Myrrh’s bitter notes arrive with shocking intensity in Jacobus Handl’s Mirabile mysterium – an exercise in chromatic tension and ambiguity – music that grasps after the ‘wondrous mystery’ of the virgin birth in violent harmonic twists and sliding side-steps. Park and his singers tug us dangerously deep into the hairpins without ever losing their footing.

With so few voices, every change of personnel has an impact. ‘Morning Star’ catches the group in flux (since the recording they’ve gained a second countertenor and lost a bass). But while some ensembles blend through mutual imitation and similarity, The Gesualdo Six manage to preserve the colours of the individual voices while finding common ground. It’s this breadth – of colour, tone, gesture – that gives these performances their appeal.