For fans of Eric Whitacre’s velvety cushions of vocal balm, the opening tracks of Voces8’s new disc will bring a sense of welcome familiarity and contentment. Go, lovely rose is the earliest work included, dating from 1992. Here are all the essential Whitacrian hallmarks: an unhurried tempo, syllabic word-setting, close-harmony clusters and a plenitude of generally soothing homophony. One of his most popular pieces, The Seal Lullaby, receives a beautifully wistful performance, as does the serene Sing Gently, which grew out of his sixth Virtual Choir pandemic initiative. Christopher Glynn’s contribution at the piano is faultless. The most recent piece (2022) is a setting of the fifth section of Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road (‘All seems beautiful to me’). Here Whitacre creates a palpable sense of the poet’s ‘great draughts of space’ with his eight-part voicings. This is a perfect gem.

The major part of the recording is given to The Sacred Veil, a 12-movement cantata composed in 2019 to commemorate the death from ovarian cancer of Julie, wife of the poet Charles Anthony Silvestri. With Emma Denton’s cello adding a ravishing eloquence to the choral/piano mix this (at times very) harrowing work reveals a much darker harmonic language, a galaxy away from his more populist works. Unsparing in his use of dissonance, Whitacre manages to illuminate the despairing sense of death and loss with an intimate refinement coupled with an increasingly soaring choral complexity. Whitacre handles the climaxes with tremendous assurance, especially in the a cappella penultimate movement, ‘You rise, I fall’, which – at nine and a half minutes’ duration – grips the listener with its dramatic sirens and emotional disintegration. By contrast, the concluding, coda-like ‘Child of wonder’ delivers a calming transcendency.

Under the composer’s gentle direction, this generously filled recording will undoubtedly achieve widespread acclaim, and deservedly so. Voces8 are the perfect match for this repertory, with a first-rate recording capturing their trademark acoustic ‘halo’.