This is a gorgeously sung collection of Tüür’s choral music, beginning with a setting of the Trisagion, used in services of the Byzantine rite. This is a trilingual version, in Estonian, Slavonic and Greek, and though it is not conceived liturgically (repeating the doxology three times, for example, would be very strange), it seems to take the Greek connection as an inspiration, with highly melismatic melodic flowerings contrasting with the solidly chorally conceived harmonies elsewhere, which suggest an Estonian refraction of Russian sacred tradition.

Kerri Kotta’s booklet notes describe the composer’s musical processes in some detail, and the formal rotations – essentially between polyphony and homophony – that are so much a part of these are clearly audible in the Missa brevis, which moves in each section between polyphony, chordal writing and dissolution of both processes into individual vocal lines. But this description should not give the impression that Tüür’s music is merely cerebral; on the contrary, as with his instrumental and orchestral output, it is colourful, engaging and generally highly unpredictable. The unpredictability is perhaps most noticeable in Omnia mutantur (on texts by Ovid and Virgil) and Canticum Canticorum Caritatis, a setting of St Paul’s words to the Corinthians on love, because, whereas in the Mass there is a certain structural expectation which the composer may choose to exploit by using it or reacting against it, in these works he is completely free. The use of vocal colour seems, therefore, more significant, and Collegium Musicale are more than equal to the task of capturing and transmitting it.

The last piece on the programme, translated as ‘Wanderer’s Evening Song’, is, as Kotta points out, from the period before the composer settled upon his distinctive compositional language and is the more intriguing for that (he makes mention, for example, of the influence of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style). An intriguing collection, in recordings that are surely definitive.