This well-planned recording presents four of Hildegard’s visionary experiences and several of her antiphons, including her best-known, Caritas habundat in omniam, with its spontaneously soaring phrases. Anonymous 4, with their smooth and restrained unison singing, are in many ways ideal interpreters; their careful avoidance of over-emphasising the rapture of the composer’s outpourings marks this performance. This is in direct contrast to the approach of the Augsburg Early Music Ensemble (Christophorus, 6/98), whose raving, highly coloured, ecstatic singing – if anything remotely similar to the way Hildegard’s nuns performed it – might well have occasioned the same stern ecclesiastical disapproval!

Anonymous 4 also introduce a degree of variety by setting some of her prose texts to ancient invitatory and reading tones, including one or two early two-part settings. They are perhaps on less certain ground here, though I find the tones intriguing, especially the one used for the opening vision of Vision 4 – In vere visione spiritus. The group has not been able to resist the temptation of adding discreet drones. They are not alone in this, though Dennis Keene (Delos, 6/98) achieves variety through an admirable use of different female ranges and timbres.

The programme is bounded by two hymns for Pentecost from a 12th-century Swiss Troper-Proser. The first is the well-known ninth century Vespers hymn Veni creator spiritus, which acts as a prologue and is followed by an 11th-century paraphrase. The last item is the Lauds hymn Beata nobis gaudia, with a rather beautiful and unusual tetradus setting. One wonders how much opportunity Hildegard would have had to hear any music other than the traditional monastic chant of her abbey, which she would have sung every day of her life. But within the limits of her musical vocabulary she is astonishingly and outstandingly creative. The booklet is adorned with pictures from the manuscript of Hildegard’s Scivias and a number of simple medieval plant and herb illustrations.