For their Naxos debut, Jeffrey Douma and the Yale Choral Artists perform music by three Yale composers that projects seriousness of intent and social responsibility. Each work is composed to stretch the musicians beyond singing the notes to identifying with the passion of the music, and of the words.

David Lang’s powerful statement to the court, dedicated to the leadership of ASCAP’s VP of Concert Music Fran Richards, uses a text by American labour leader Eugene Debs; sung a cappella at first, it is then broken gradually into variegated groups with piercingly beautiful solos by an unnamed solo soprano.

Ted Hearne’s seven-minute Consent, written for the Yale choir to be paired with a performance of Tallis’s motet Loquebantur variis linguis, sets his own love letters, Jewish and Catholic marriage contracts and evidence from the Steubenville Rape Trial of 2013 with disturbing consequences, as the four texts overlap and leave the listener horrified. It is sung with brilliant command and precise levels of volume and intensity.

Hannah Lash’s 40 minute Requiem is a gentler, more lyrical, less doomsday-laden response to the existence of mortality. She immediately scores points by using her own ‘re translation’ from the Latin, the result merging text and music together in an inevitable flow. There are some hints of Britten here and there but Lash writes in her own language entirely, enchanting and enchanted. The instrumentalists play as beautifully as the singers sing – the composer plays the harp in the Agnus Dei – and countertenor Eric Brenner soars in his three big solos.