Following Sono Luminus’s recording of chamber works by Hugi Gðumundsson (1/23), Dacapo brings us the Icelandic composer’s oratorio The Gospel of Mary, distilled from the ancient text of the same name by Danish librettists Nila Parly and Niels Brunse. It is an account of the death and resurrection of Christ by one of the few individuals to have witnessed both, Mary Magdalene (evidently the first to meet the risen Jesus). The work was premiered in Iceland by forces including Schola Cantorum Reykjavicensis, who travelled to Aarhus in Denmark to make this recording with the Aarhus Sinfonietta in 2022.

Guðmundsson’s score pivots on the friction between Mary’s account of what happened and that of Peter, the apostle who refused to believe that Jesus would have confided in a woman. The structural lead of Bach’s passions is faintly felt, the music progressing through arias and chorales with occasional bursts of instrumental drama and five cleansing meditations for solo instruments. Here the chorus moves much of the narrative forwards, its male members embodying a stentorian, dense, defensive counterpart to the nuanced, reflective, feminine presence of Mary, strongly felt here courtesy of Berit Norbakken’s clarion-clear soprano, laden with feeling and channelling some enraptured music.

Guðmundsson’s almost neo-Baroque aesthetic helps amplify the comparison with Bach, along with an unmistakable sense of residual pain and the feeling of a rhythmic tread that could have come straight from one of his Passions. Taken as a whole, however, the work can feel uneven and occasionally incongruous. Moments of striking rapture mingle with stock devices and a certain textural and harmonic naivety that may serve a broader purpose but grate on the ear in the context of the expression elsewhere.

The best moments have a Bryars-like sense of space and harmonic import or, in contrast, thickets of dense instrumental conversation like Bach’s St John Passion. The five instrumental meditations are immensely effective and beautifully crafted, as is the start of the Postludium, which echoes Chou En-lai’s valedictory line in Nixon in China: ‘to work’. On the flipside are passages that, to my ears and given what we know about this composer’s abilities, feel either unduly misty-eyed or simply unwieldy.