To appreciate best the quality of the Westminster Singers (whom we have hitherto heard only in English music), turn first to Poulenc's earliest religious work, the Litanies a la Vierge noire written following the death in a car crash of his friend Ferroud (a composer whose many works still await revival). Here the purity of intonation clarity of enunciation, shapely phrasing, intensity of expression and range of tonal contrasts mark them out as a most accomplished body; and supported as they are by sensitive orchestral playing which goes from a honeyed introduction to a big climax and back again—strange that none of the current recordings use Poulenc's original organ accompaniment, which appeared with such spectacular effect on the Argo LP by the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge—this is a highly recommendable performance.
The same is true of the work Poulenc regarded as his finest, the Stabat mater. The Ozawa/DG version listed above—you can forget the disappointing EMI Pretre—runs the new version close, not least for Battle's radiant singing (though Dubosc, warmer in tone, is equally good); but Ozawa tended to hurry, his chorus was not quite clean at the ''Fac ut ardeat'' entries, and a reverberant acoustic worked against clarity in ''Eja mater''. Hickox's chorus is splendidly firm (the sopranos don't blench at those high entries on ''Virgo virginum praeclara'') and its chording of the chromatic ''Fac ut ardeat'' is secure, but it doesn't match the fury of Ozawa's ''Quis est homo'', and the work's very first bass entry needed to have been a little stronger.
Ozawa's chorus in the Gloria was set too far back for verbal clarity, he himself took some questionable speeds, and Battle was very slightly sharp in her first unaccompanied Amens. Here the balance is better, the chorus sings with greater nuance, and the orchestral contribution is distinguished. I like the joyful but steady ''Laudamus'', the rhythmic bite of ''Domine fili unigenite'', the solid ''Qui sedes'' and the fervent ''Amen'', but ''Domine Deus'', which the soprano takes very much slower than the preceding seven-bar introduction, drags as badly as in the Pretre version, and despite Poulenc's exhortation ''cependant sans trainer'', Hickox slows down greatly for the final ''Qui sedes''. He is slow too in ''Domine Deus Agnus Dei'', but he makes it cohere: at this speed, though, stress is laid on Poulenc's sentimental streak that lay side by side with his obviously Stravinskian acerbities.'