Rosalind Franklin (1920-58) was one of the 20th century’s most important scientists but she was deprived of her moment in the spotlight due to the machinations of Nobel prize-winners Watson and Crick, who used her groundbreaking crystallographic imaging (‘Photo 51’) of the DNA double helix as the cornerstone of their research while denying Franklin any credit. A burning sense of injustice is a recurrent theme of this marvellous collection of ‘motetta scientifica’ [sic] by five female British composers (a shame no male colleagues were involved).

Electric Voice Theatre’s wonderfully manicured sound, ultra-clear enunciation of the texts – many containing technical and distinctly unsingable terms like ‘Geometrogenesis’ – and marvellously dramatic delivery of texts and music are wholly winning, the four singers at times taking the roles of Franklin and the villainous Watson and Crick. The myriad styles and resonances in the music are delivered with aplomb, whether the soundscapes of Minerva Scientifica by lead soprano Frances Lynch, the echoes of Norfolk folk song (shades of a cappella Steeleye Span!) in the delightful Swallowtail, the denser writing of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Photo 51 or Lynne Plowman’s fractured, half-whispered textures opening K Ras.

There’s humour here, too, most obviously at the denouement of Lynch’s DNA: Rosalind Franklin. The only work not wholly successful here is, I feel, Shirley Thompson’s diptych Life Sequences, where the spoken text, delivered with great authority by Professor Ellen Solomon, falls rather flat, jarring in the musical context. Kate Whitley’s integration of speech and music in Theories of Quantum Mechanics, using the singers themselves to declaim the spoken text, works far better. The booklet documents well the ‘Franklin Project’. Required listening for oh, so many reasons!