O'Connell the Music

HAYDN REEDER SOLOS DUOS TRIOS

Move Records MCD 666

A retrospective for Haydn Reeder in some ways, this CD contains two trios – one in two parts scored for your classic piano trio; the other a single movement combining flutes, viola and harp – a pair of duos for flute and violin, then violin and cello, followed by a welter of solos, pretty much all for piano with a solitary exception for cello. One of the five keyboard solos comprises a set of six rapid studies, but the disc’s sixteen tracks are generally short: all the piano pieces come in at less than five minutes each, two of the studies not getting to sixty seconds. It’s not the slimmest collection I’ve come across on CD but at a little over 56 minutes, you’d be expecting fair quality.

Some of the performers are well-known, like cellist Rosanne Hunt, violinist Susan Pierotti, flautist Johanna Selleck, and pianist Danae Killian. Some have been local presences for several years, like violin Philip Nixon from Orchestra Victoria and violist Barbara Hornung whom I last heard three years ago on Johanna Selleck’s Becoming CD, also from Move Records. The Six Studies are entrusted to Elton Sun, winner of last year’s Young Lev Vlassenko Competition in Brisbane but information about him is hard to track down.; according to Reeder’s CD leaflet, he was 12 when recording these pieces.

As retrospectives go, this is a fairly wide-ranging one covering 25 years’ activity. The oldest of Reeder’s works we hear is the Tolling Bell Song piano solo of 1998; then skip forward eight years for the Two Pieces for Piano Trio. Sun’s readings of the studies come from 2014, while the Lines in a Landscape trio dates from 2016 and is the longest track here at 7’20”. Waxing and Waning, the violin/flute duet, was written in 2019 while everything else comes from 2021 (Rondo, piano solo), 2022 (Wheels Piece, another piano solo), or 2023 (Surrounding the Cello solo, and The Spinning and Weaving of Destiny for solo piano). Still, the first works by the composer I can trace come from 1970, so we’re hearing mature chamber music – well, middle-to-late period material.

Matters open with the two piano trio pieces. The first, Growth and Transformation, has it all in the title. It begins with piano notes which the strings take over; you’ve got to go somewhere from here. And Reeder does with increasingly more complex aphorisms, punctuated by lacunae, until we reach an instrumental interplay of pizzicato and staccato line-crossing. My only problem is that I’m not quick enough to realize what is being transformed, although the growth is apparent. This small sample of musical biology brings us Philip Nixon’s violin, Rosanne Hunt’s cello and Danae Killian’s piano, giving full voice to Reeder’s angular, atonal counterpoint.

The same artists work through Flowering of the Resonances, which opens with a series of thick chords from Killian in a sort of Donaueschingen vallee des cloches. The string instruments enter with a series of vehement brief attack-motifs and Reeder builds his piece around textures rather than any overt development I could find. Again, much of the progress is by short bursts of colour with plenty of room for tremolando and sforzando bolts from a clear sky. The results offer a series of instrumental colours, all three eventually weaving around each other softly near the end.

Selleck opens Lines in a Landscape on alto flute and ends the work on a concert instrument. The main interest here is her partnership with Hornung’s viola as their instrumental parts urge each other forward, in the early stages playing at least twice in unison. Mestrovic’s harp isn’t secondary in interest, her role coming into solitary prominence at specific points, but you couldn’t call her contribution linear. Reeder speaks of the songlines of our First Nations people and there is probably a case to be made for such an image in this music if only I could remember my Chatwin. As things stand, this trio is of a piece with its two predecessors in its calm abstraction, although the latter score is somehow more discursive, even if its setting is the horizonless Outback.

Naturally, the textural interplay is more easy to read in the Waxing and Waning duo, here performed by Selleck and Pierotti. The composer sets up his material very clearly and you can follow his intervallic and chordal workings without befuddlement, mainly because he varies the players’ attack and output with an eye for dynamic contrast, as well as living up to his title’s promise in outlining increases and decreases of activity through a transparent environment so that you are aware of every flutter and trill, no matter how faint. It’s yet another instance of Reeder’s ability to construct a scenario with simple means but maintaining your attention by not wearing out his welcome: being discreet in the best possible way.

Just as easy to comprehend is the following Wheels within Wheels for violin and cello. Pierotti and Hunt circle around each other but the movement only presents as regular in a sustained passage at the centre of the piece where the lines are simultaneous, if not congruent in their notation or direction. For most of the time, the wheels intersect but break off, the patterns momentarily circular but more suggestive of plot-lines rather than anything mechanical. It’s suggestive of a consciousness you have of parts of a complex becoming visible, then being shut off, or replaced by something similar but somehow askew. The effect is slightly unsettling but also refreshing in its open-endedness.

What follows these ensemble pieces is a chain of six solos, mainly for piano. Killian opens the sequence with the CD’s earliest piece, Tolling Bell Song, which is something of a single-minded construct comprising sustained initial sounds with arpeggio-like companion-notes radiating off from the initial stroke. Reeder offers rhythmic differentiation by alternating 2/4 bars with irregular semiquaver ‘fillers’ in 10/16 measures, for example, although even these have their initial bell-type strikes. Yet again, you’re reminded of Ravel, if in a vocabulary that is fifty years further along the historical track.

Sun’s readings of the studies are quietly competent. None of the six is particularly demonstrative or confrontational, all being interrupted, to a greater or lesser extent, by fermate or pauses in the action. As with the duos, Reeder presents his material at the outset and moves gradually (sometimes imperceptibly) into a sort of development, which could be a simple process of adding notes to a melody strand, as in No. 1, or swerving to an opposing piece of materiel, e.g. No. 4. These bagatelles are distinct in character and, to his credit, Reeder speaks in his own voice throughout, not really bringing to mind any significant precedents. And he has found a sympathetic interpreter in this young pianist who outlines each study with composed authority.

Killian opens Wheels Piece with another of the composer’s single-line patterns of five notes that rises, then falls back on itself before another line joins and we enter a now-familiar field of two-line counterpoint with caesurae. The rhythmic movement becomes more insistent and we return to the environs of the Tolling Bell Song with single resonant notes sustained while secondary arpeggio patterns radiate out from them. Then we return to the rising pattern from the opening which is now both assertive and shadowy before the rotation stops in a finishing upward flourish – the wheels have come off?

With The Weaving and Spinning of Destiny, Killian takes us immediately into Meine Ruh’ ist hin territory with a repeated simultaneous arpeggio-type pattern in both hands which moves into some by-now-familiar Reeder vocabulary with sudden stops and repetitions-with-accretions, the complex leading to abrupt bumps, both fortissimo and pianissimo, spiced by some repeated note ostinati. Some bass chords are splayed out until they are reduced to their single top note which is repeated, fading into an inaudible space. This may be the composer’s outline of a personal destiny, or it could be applied to us all but I find philosophy’s big subjects impossible to get a handle on; I’d be lost in Also sprach Zarathustra if it weren’t for Strauss’s signposts and the only dissertation/dialogue of some elevation that means much to me is Bernstein’s party-piece Serenade.

Rosanne Hunt gives a spirited performance of the solo Surrounding the Cello which contrasts a downward-moving initial motif with a set of aggressive double-stop intervals that can move in either direction. Reeder sets some technical hurdles here including (I think) sul tasto work and a moment or two or sul ponticello, your odd scrape and harmonic (I assume intentional). Nothing too outrageous, though, and all carefully compartmentalized thanks to the composer’s insertion of aural station-stops. It strikes me that it’s not so much a question of surrounding the cello but more seeing what it can do – a sort of a propos the cello.

Finally, Killian returns with Rondo, which I found the most difficult of the pieces to imbibe. It begins with shades – as the composer informs us – of Berg (the Piano Sonata opening?) and Schoenberg (Op. 11?), but moves out into more diffuse areas which pile up on top of each other. About a third of the way in, the tonality seems more ‘white-note’ than anything else in a stentorian declamation before we hear bass chords-plus-melody under high-tessitura decorative chord-sparks. The bass/middle register texture remains present for some time before a sudden burst of double-handed furioso which itself shifts into pointillistic staccato in both hands that brings the piece to an enigmatic, Scarbo-like open end.

You could call Reeder a middle voice in the development of Australian music, I feel, because he is not of the melody-rules-and-the-more-diatonic-the-better sept, nor is he part of the look-at-me-and-my-daring tribe. His language is calm, controlled and belongs to those logical, clear-headed and emotionally controlled ranks that work at composition with an awareness of responsibility to communicate with an informed band of listeners. I’m welcoming this CD as disseminating the work of a gifted contemporary writer who speaks to us with remarkable clarity.

WAR SONATAS

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3477

Behind these three piano sonatas, Michael Kieran Harvey centres on some major crises of our age which are essentially colossal failures of action and inaction. The works operate in ways that are unfamiliar to those of us reared on the conflict portraits of Shostakovich, Nono, Penderecki and Britten; all four masters have compositions to their names that memorialize acts or states of warfare, scores that present emotional and intellectual challenges. Still, as we’re concerned with music, the underpinning principles (or lack of them) involved remain tacit as far as further elaboration is concerned.

Harvey’s Sonata No. 8 bears the title P. Singer, referring to the Australian philosopher to whom the composer is highly indebted for his findings on ethical behaviour and our treatment of the animal world. Much of the teaching of Singer would be familiar to anyone aware of his work with the Greens and his public statements while vying for parliamentary office. Can you present bio-ethical argument in musical form? Probably not but Harvey presents us with a powerful, lopsided sonata with a massive first movement and two much briefer addenda.

Actually, this emphasis on initial dissertations at some length obtains in the following two sonatas. the second entitled Sonata da Caemmerer refers to Harvey’s long-time colleague and friend Arjun von Caemmerer, while also having a bit of word play with the sonata da camera form, even if the most willing of us find it hard to figure out workable comparisons. Its opening Zappaesque lasts as long as the following Rubato and Giusto tempo combined. For Sonata No. 10, you can see the title reference on the CD cover above: Riding with Death. Leonardo’s illustration shows Envy riding on a casket, and I’m assuming that this concerns a different type of dissertation from the previous two personally dedicated sonatas as Harvey is concerned here with AI and its pernicious character in generating weapons used in conflicts across our world today. Here, the first movement lasts a little over fifteen minutes, its lone successor a little less than seven.

Apart from this tenth sonata’s monitory message against giving in to the machines, what have the other works to do that they fall under the War umbrella? The answer is to do with their environment rather than any imitation of the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle. Harvey sees these three works as a triptych and it is unavoidable that you seek common elements in all of them, even if many of these are simply part-and-parcel of the composer’s compositional arsenal. They were all completed in a stretch of 19-20 months across 2022 and 2023, a time which saw a massive escalation in the war initiated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and at its end saw the opening of the Israel-Gaza conflict which has itself become an Old Testament-inspired annihilation. Despite Singer’s anti-Vietnam War stance, you have to stretch mentally to find resonances between that time so full of righteous protest and today’s oscillation of sympathies, compounded by the overtly destructive policies of Putin and Trump and the diplomatic flip-flops from leaders you ought to be able to trust.

In the second of these works, saluting von Caemmerer, the relationship with war comes from the empathy both Harvey and his colleague find in facing the soul-destroying realities of today’s partisanships and the disillusionment that every day produces as the sides in both conflicts become even more imbalanced and any trust in diplomacy proves hollow. Of the three parts to this triptych, this work presents as the least troubled, although that could be just a superficial judgement about its feisty rhythmic jaunts.

Certainly, the most enigmatic is the Riding with Death two-movement construct in which Harvey presents eight Hallucinations for a first movement – reductions to nightmarish scenarios where we waver against artificial intelligence while it weaves its multiple webs of influence and confusion. This is another large-scale essay, or series of paragraphs in which the activity level oscillates between slow angularity and fierce vitality. In the sonata’s second phase, less than half the length of the first, the lessening of humanity is entrenched, leading to a set of final pages where the aural onslaught is overwhelming as we surrender all power to mechanisms that pound us into nothingness – or worse, irrelevance.

The Singer sonata opens with an assertive Allegro giusto that emphasizes athletic leaps, and a motif consisting of a repeated note that accretes companions in an upward or downward-heading flourish, given in both hands. And abruptly, we are in the middle of a Harvey 4/4 mesh of semiquavers, syncopated accents, brief motifs, and an ardently driven energy. Relief comes in a rubato interlude that sees sustained chords wrapped in decorative foliage, the whole leading to a Lisztian climax of epic virtuosity before we return to the giusto and that obsessive wide-ranging percussiveness of the opening.

Another interlude, an A piacere, interrupts a plethora of sextuplets operating at cross-purposes before the composer presents a new chain of atmospheres by way of holding down unstruck chords with one hand and bringing their strings into voice by hammering out abrupt explosions in the other. Eventually we come to a dramatic triple forte climax and a statement of the dedicatee’s surname in complex soft chords; don’t ask me what notes represent S, I, N and R. For good measure, Harvey also gives us Singer’s name backwards in chords that largely have the same components as the originals.

A reversion to the giusto vehement drive, another dramatic a piacere and a series of fortissimo and pianissimo juxtapositions, and the movement ends on a final statement of the single-note-plus-accretions motif leading to a final bass chord of two discordant fourths. What’s next to do but propose a brief Onirico interlude, an unsettled dream that features gruff bass gruppetti and ornate right-hand arabesques while the substance lies in a chain of hefty ten-note sustained chords, the whole dissolving into a five-bar Liberamente excursion prior to folding into the final Ritmico pages.

This finale comprises six permutations and I can see some transferences between two of them but it’s probably best viewed as a set of discrete scenes that offer wide variations in rhythm and harmonic density. Which is not saying much when you look back over the rest of the sonata even if, as in this final movement, the oasis passages blend into the architecture so that the score sounds like a tapestry with consistent threads, brought together at the end by a vital restatement of the fixed-note-with-additions leitmotif.

Harvey begins his Caemmerer score with two identical bars of four double-dotted crotchets in 7/4 time, not wasting his time about submerging this simple material in syncopated cross-measures throughout a movement indebted to one of the composer’s inspirations: Frank Zappa. Disjunction is the game in play here as hefty accents bounce across the frenetic action that finds the executant oscillating between bars with irregular numbers of semiquavers so that you can’t settle into a regular toe-tapping pulse. But then you never can with Harvey who delights in establishing a rhythm that you think is formulaic but which turns out to be deceptive, the accent not where you thought it would be.

Without pause, the score moves into its second phase, Rubato, which proffers a limited meditation on the work’s opening four notes – or perhaps not. This is another set of pages that moves into lavish sound-washes that become more ornate after the movement’s staid, Satie-like opening. The splashes of sound are woven around sustained chords of remarkable complexity that build on the placid sequence initially articulated, before a small transition of about 20 bars Meno mosso breaks open the concluding Giusto tempo set in one of the composer’s most taxing rhythms: 11/16.

You hurtle here from climax through highpoint to explosion, one after another in a powerful exhibition of virtuosity which somehow emphasizes Harvey’s boundless energetic high spirits. You can recognize striding octave bass patterns that transfer to the right hand, punchy block-chords that call and respond across the instrument, hugger-mugger at-the-octave parallel passages like the most taxing five-finger exercises. The composer is here at his most ebullient, giving us some kind of representation of his friendship with von Caemmerer in a sparkling toccata that finally dwindles after a chain of dyads enjoy a diminuendo – as though the dialogue is paused, not ended.

While the first two sonatas in this sequence have been humanized by their dedicatees, the last moves into the realm of a cerebral conflict between AI and its creators. Across the first movement, Harvey offers eight scenarios, states where humans think they are in control. These vary markedly in activity level; a deftly outlined linear argument is followed by an initially calm state that is subjected to pinpricks of doubt or harassment. One of these hallucinations speaks with an updated Webernian angularity while another offers an initial calm underpinned by nervous semiquaver chains that eventually coerce the upper chords into a mirroring rapid angst.

Finally, we arrive at Hammered, relentless which offers a barrage of semiquaver chords in alternating hands with gruff chords as pivots. Harvey is wise enough, even in his anger, to vary the diet with abrupt changes of register and dynamic, not to mention those improbable time signatures that sweep your security blanket away. After some relieving pages in the more fluid ambience of triplets, the opening growling bass recurs and drives the forward motion into a maelstrom of strident chords that grow from seven, through nine to a concluding welter of insistent twelve note chords hammered martellato to an abrupt ending where the human is subsumed in the automaton.

In the end, Harvey’s latest sonatas don’t take war as their subject even if you hear emphatic bursts of energy that speak of turmoil and the suffering that large-scale conflicts bring about. More, the scores have been generated in tempore belli, a grim state that we have been inhabiting for some years, even insulated as we are in this place from the worst of its evils. The composer has been fortunate enough to find a framework for his considerations of these times in the species-broad altruism of Singer, and to hone his aesthetic in van Cammaerer’s friendship and collaboration. In the end, he faces us with the potential for inhumanity in AI and its assumption of authority. But, thanks to the brave agitation and fearlessness of his music, we can follow the best stoic directive and say not the struggle naught availeth.

A THOUSAND BEAUTIFUL AND GRACEFUL INVENTIONS

The University of Queensland Chamber Singers

Move Records MCD 663

As you can see from the cover, this CD is concerned with canons from the eras when this device was integral to choral composition. What we hear comes from research conducted by Denis Collins and Jason Stoessel; both are academics with Collins an associate professor of musicology at the University of Queensland, Stoessel also an associate professor of musicology and digital humanities at the University of New England. In combination, these two are the CD’s artistic directors, even if the actual man out front is Graeme Morton, senior lecturer at Queensland University and probably the most well-credentialed choral conductor in that state.

In its display of canons, the CD holds 17 tracks. Six of these feature works by Palestrina and Agostini: first, a Sanctus and Agnus Dei from the former’s Missa Sacerdotes Domini; then, from Agostini’s Missa Pro vigiliis ac feriis in canone, the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Sit nomen Domini which is a pontifical blessing that sends everybody home in high ecclesiastical spirits. Preceding these samples of canon in late Renaissance choral music, the University of Queensland Chamber Singers wend their placid way through another Kyrie and Sanctus from a 14th century manuscript found in the Cathedral of Tournai, written by anonymous hands (or a hand); the original manuscripts found between the pages of the celebrated Mass of Tournai. Then follows a group of three canonic pieces by Matteo da Perugia, Du Fay and Okeghem, a set of three chansons by Jean Mouton, before another triptych by Prioris, Josquin and Willaert.

It’s with reference to the last of these that the CD finds its title: a quote from Gioseffo Zarlino, the 16th century composer/theorist who was one of Willaert’s pupils and who wrote of his teacher in glowing terms: ‘One can hear daily many compositions by the most excellent Adrian Willaert which, in addition to being full of a thousand beautiful and graceful inventions, are eruditely and elegantly composed’. Well, you can’t say fairer than that, can you? But, as with every composer here, the emphasis is on a particular type of invention – the use of canon and the complexities that involves

Such complications start straight away. The Tournai Kyrie is for three lines but the canons are eventually sung simultaneously so that, despite the linear mesh, everybody sings the same words at the same time. It all works out neatly with nine sections – three Kyries, three Christes, three Kyries – and you can hear repetitions of patterns as the lines wind around each other, more obvious with some rapid semi-ornamental work in the final pages that is shared across the parts. When we get to the Sanctus track, your reception becomes easier as the entries into the canon are staggered (as in the Kyrie) but the canonic material is rather plain. Still, the same principle applies about the words which are (generally) sung simultaneously.

These opening tracks offer the UQ singers in exposed fashion, the Kyrie involving female singers, the Sanctus/Benedictus given to the males. Both groups are solid enough, the females having one individual whose timbre shines through at certain points, while the men have all the emotional control of a French monastery group from those mid-20th century recordings of Gregorian chant.

Matteo da Perugia’s Gloria Spiritus et alme presents as a simple section of the Common of the Mass but with interpolations at the end of certain lines which stand as praises to the Virgin; rather exceptional in the context of this extolling of the Triune God. Like a rather striking sample of conductus, this piece speaks with remarkable vivacity, clear in all its parts, but I think that might be due to the two dancing upper lines being sung by individual sopranos. Here, the canon is located in two slow-moving bass parts; for this impatient ear, you’d need a score to trace it.

Dufay’s Gloria ad modum tubae sets up two canons: the first is between two upper voices who follow each other without trickery or, for that matter, much melodic intrigue, while a pair of bass lines sing the same two notes in imitation of those promised trumpets; might have been better to use the actual instruments. But the effect is breezy and forthright: one of the quickest Glorias I’ve come across and handled with excellent pitching by the Singers’ women.

We move to the secular with Okeghem’s Prenez sur moi, a buoyant canon for three voices in which the UQ tenors acquit themselves very well, as do the sopranos, although the alto line is very restrained in volume. This is a sample of that generous well-crafted language, musical and literary, that exemplifies good old-fashioned cortoisie, if with a dose of cynicism, but expertly delivered here – twice, as it happens, as the singers repeat the piece.

Mouton’s three chansons begin with En venant de Lyon which documents a vignette – observing Robin and Marion up to some bawdy congress in a thicket. The canon is for four lines, each following the other in quick succession as though to delineate the rapid nature of the focal pair’s activities. The double canon that follows, Qui ne regrettroit on the death of fellow-composer Antoine Fevin, shows a more serious aspect, the soprano (cantus) in canon with the tenor, alto and bass pursuing each other in this calm, expressive elegy. Finally, Adieu mes amours presents another double canon, sopranos and altos dealing with one, tenors and basses with the other, all matched in a seamless web that sets forth plainly the composer/poet’s humorous farewell to life because the king hasn’t paid him.

The shadowy figure of Prioris (Johannes? Denis?) produced a brief sample of splendour in his Ave Maria setting which is an eight voice work featuring four canons. I have to admit that, while the first two canons can be followed part of the way through this brief score, the other two are almost impossible to pick out, even if you have the four Incipit phrases in front of you. For all that, the Chamber Singers invest it with a placid fervour, their output measured and finely-shaped even if the top sopranos dominate the texture.

Josquin, the master of the canon in every age, is represented in this tour d’horizon by his six-line setting of Se congie prens, which deals with a lover departing the scene before further suffering at the hands of his cold non-inamorata. The program notes speak of a canon between the two middle voices, but I can only hear one between what my score calls the Quinta Pars and the Sexta Pars, and an intermittent one between the two lowest voices (tenor and bass). The construction of his piece rewards study but in actual performance all you concentrate on is the countertenor part, here sung by some confident tenors who cope with a cruelly athletic line to fine effect showing only one sign of strain.

The mellifluous Willaert hits us with a double canon in his motet Christi virgo dilectissima; soprano and bass form one pairing, alto and tenor the other. In this performance, I think the alto line features male voices but I could be wrong, being sadly unfamiliar with the sound quality of the Queensland mezzo voice. This composer moves on from the rhythmic simplicity of his predecessors and has the lines operating in different time zones, adding contrapuntal complexity to the mixture. This is one of the more substantial tracks so far, helped in that by being divided into two segments to reflect the textual matter although both conclude with the same plea for help.

The interpretation is a strait-laced one with the dynamic range kept limited and that serves to underline the composer’s calm pace of inventiveness. Then we come to Palestrina, from whose Missa Sacerdotes Domini we hear the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. I won’t insist that we’ve come to a new plane of creativity, but it’s certainly different in its ease of utterance and the actual presence of six interdependent and independent lines. The opening sounds like a canon involving all the voices, but you could say the same about any number of Palestrina masses that open with the same scrap and then move onto their own paths that imitate details from each other without strictly following the set line.

When we reach the Pleni sunt caeli, the vocal lines cut to three and here the canon is emphatic but the male voices curvet around each other with apparent freedom, the UQ men having an amiable felicity with these pages. And you might be forgiven for seeking canons in the four-part Benedictus but it comes down to imitative entries that veer off onto individual trajectories. With the Agnus Dei, the singers give us only one of the three sentences; understandable as Palestrina apparently didn’t supply a separate dona nobis pacem setting. I think that the canon here obtains between the pairs of tenors because, while everybody takes up the initial bass phrase, several voices dip out on their own excursions by the time we come to Qui tollis.

You think its all going to be plain sailing when you arrive at Paolo Agostini’s Mass which begins with a transparent canon for four voices in its Kyrie, all the more eloquent for its brevity and the clarity of its structure. And so it proves to be with the entries just as plain in the Sanctus, Osanna, and the two settings for the Benedictus – the first without basses, the second without sopranos. As in the Palestrina, the Singers give us only the first verse of the Agnus Dei, a movement in close canonic quarters with a particularly fine amplitude effect at the miserere nobis.

The Sit nomen Domini blessing is notable for the addition of an extra bass line which operates with its partner in a rich sequence of consecutive thirds while your regulation soprano, alto and bass voices outline the canon entries on top in a brief touch of sweet harmony to finish the disc. And, with a few exceptions, that is a lasting impression – one of brevity. The length of each track is not given in the accompanying booklet but my count puts the CD’s length at 47’34”; the longest track is the Willaert motet (7’01”), followed by Palestrina’s Sanctus (6’58”), with Perugian Matteo’s Gloria coming third (5’10). Two offerings come in at under a minute, five at under two minutes, five a bit over two minutes, with the remaining two averaging four minutes between them.

What you get is a well-sung set of choral canons, most of them traceable by the ear alone. It’s a fair mixture of the sacred and profane, although the former predominate. Further, the performances are secure and controlled; full marks to an organization that escaped my notice during the years I spent in the neighbourhood.. And further congratulations to the felicitous ease with which all concerned handle what could have been a dry academic exercise.