It’s 30 years since the ECM label released Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble’s ‘Officium’ (10/94), whose synthesis of plainsong and early polyphony with jazz and ambient elements opened many listeners’ ears to the affective power and potential of placing the saxophone’s plangent sound within a choral context.

The latest album to explore this combination, ‘Palimpsest’, takes a somewhat different approach. While ‘Officium’ erred towards smoother, soothing sonorities and homogeneous textures, several compositions on this collection of new works for saxophone and choir foreground abrupt contrasts and dramatic disruptions. Roderick Williams’s powerful setting of God so loved the world places quotations from John Stainer’s Crucifixion against agitated quick-fire responses from Sam Corkin’s saxophone, while Philip White’s juxtaposition of harmonic layers in his arrangement of Thomas Tallis’s If ye love me yields some deliciously polymodal moments. Errollyn Wallen’s adaptation of the American gospel song ‘Wayfaring stranger’ imbues its spiritual message with added intensity by placing the saxophone in the role of the solitary individual, the voices of The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral under David Newsholme offering a comforting blanket of reassurance.

The notion of the palimpsest as a creative object revealing layers of writing added to (or placed over) the original seems particularly appropriate in this context, as most settings use pre-existing material in some way or other. The results vary from Paul Newton-Jackson’s epic reimagining of early 16th-century composer Robert Carver’s Missa Dum sacrum mysterium to David Knotts’s imaginative recreation of religious conflict, war and political strife during the reign of Ferdinand II of Spain in Una sañosa porfiá. Kerensa Briggs and Owain Park’s subtle, nuanced approaches to the music of Hildegard of Bingen and Jean Mouton respectively in Spiritus sanctus vivificans and Tota pulchra es manage to recapture something of the timeless, transcendental qualities of ‘Officium’.

If the saxophone sometimes appears as something of an addition to the choral writing, the best examples – such as Gabriel Jackson’s stirring Sancte Deus or Francis Pott’s luminescent Rosa sine spina – offer a more effective integration of both elements, suggesting new palimpsestic layers of meaning in this powerfully expressive medium.