The chemistry of mysticism, a partiality for orientalism and a career teaching at St Paul’s Girls’ School for over 30 years lay behind Gustav Holst’s creation of a colourful repertoire for women’s voices in the early 20th century and was also undoubtedly an expedient catalyst in shaping a modernist language out of his earlier assimilation of Wagner. Though there are still harmonic residues of Wagner in the third set of Rig Veda hymns (1910) and the Two Eastern Pictures (1911), the emphasis on new organisational techniques (especially of ostinato and other repetitive practices) and the numinous tessitura and sonorities of the female voices looks forward to the future crystallisation of Holst’s more personal, post-romantic voice. This facet of Holst’s development, at least to me, is even more evident in the Dirge and Hymeneal (1915), where the evocation of a funereal atmosphere by experimental harmonic oscillations shares an obvious audible kinship with ‘Saturn’ in The Planets. Supported sensitively by harpist Louise Thomson, these are all beautifully sung by the Corvus Consort under their director Freddie Crowley, and recorded with admirable clarity by Chandos.

Imogen Holst’s Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow, a fresh and attractive set of six part-songs for harp and female voices, was the result of a commission for the 1950 Aldeburgh Festival, where the composer had close connections with Benjamin Britten. Ostinatos and elements of bitonality, somewhat redolent of her father’s techniques, contribute significantly to the cycle, notably in the mercurial scherzo ‘Teignmouth’ and the gentle, sombre yet magical ‘Lullaby’. Several of the songs – ‘Welcome joy’, ‘Lullaby’ and ‘Shed no tear’ – are based on protracted pedal points, left unresolved at their conclusions; others depend on the detailed working out of specific intervals.

The much-underrated talent of Elizabeth Poston (who like Gustav and Imogen Holst worked most effectively in the domain of shorter, less symphonic structures) is represented here in An English Day-Book, commissioned for the choir of Aldershot County High School and the Farnham Festival of 1967 and which, replete with corresponding harp interlude and framing ‘A Bellman’s Song’, Poston intended to be an ‘all-year’ complement to Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. Though performed numerous times during her lifetime, the set of 11 choruses remained unpublished; on this premiere recording, we hear them in a new modern edition sponsored by the Multitude of Voyces project. Poston’s imaginative literary sources (particularly of medieval and Renaissance poetry) and musical style-forms provide a vivid menagerie of aphorisms: ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ (based on the Compline plainsong), ‘A Night Curse’, ‘Lemady’, the lively ‘A Charm against the Bumble Bee’, ‘The Noonday Heat’ (based on a mellifluous tune by William Boyce), the familiar ‘Spring’ of Thomas Nashe, the sleepy ‘Evening Song’ and nocturnal ‘Sweet Suffolk Owl’ all have memorable features and, characteristic of their composer, economic accompaniments for the harp.

The six other pieces on this CD date from the past seven years. Four of them, by Hilary Campbell, Gemma McGregor, Olivia Sparkhall and Judith Weir, are also products of the Multitude of Voyces initiative and were commissioned for the annual service for International Womens’ Day. A stipulation of three of these commissions was to set texts from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and this gave rise to three gentle, meditative ‘anthems’ by Campbell (Our Endless Day), McGregor (Love was his meaning) and Weir (We sekyn here rest). Sparkhall’s Lux aeterna, also inspired by Julian of Norwich, is notable for its use of two female choruses, its deployment of chant or chant-like vocal lines and its spatial dimension. The two pieces, both composed in 2024, by Shruthi Rajasekar, exhibit interesting elements of novelty. Ushās, commissioned by the Corvus Consort, was written in response to Holst’s third set of Rig Veda hymns and shares one of Holst’s texts (though set in Sanskrit rather than English translation). An interesting ritualistic experiment in its use of chant, its contemplative focus contrasts with the Latin of Livius’s Priestess and a much greater range of emotional states enunciated by the richer and varied textures of the six-part chorus.