Choral music aficionados will love this program, featuring as it does two great mass settings of the twentieth century, Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir and Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. Both works in their own way exude a very Gallic musical and spiritual sensibility. Martin’s a cappella Mass is an early work and reflects something

of his Swiss Calvinist upbringing, but its austerity is relieved with some lush harmony derived from his love of French composers Franck and Debussy. Duruflé’s Requiem is a thoroughly Catholic affair, based largely on the plainsong Mass for the Dead but clothed in a luxuriously colourful harmonic idiom.

The St George’s Consort, an adult ensemble formed in 2008, handles the Martin with equal amounts of skill and passion. As in all choral music recordings, a balance has to be struck between closely observed vocal power and the enchantment of distance. In the Martin, the balance is tipped in favour of immediacy. This allows for sections like the Pleni sunt coeli of the Sanctus, with its motoric rhythms, to make maximum impact as well as showing how capable the group is of sustaining long phrases like those in the Agnus Dei.

The cathedral choir and consort together give a well-honed account of the Duruflé in the version with organ accompaniment. Once again the voices are to the fore, while the well-played organ is discreetly (sometimes too discreetly) balanced against them. Treble William Huxtable exhibits many fine vocal qualities in the Pie Jesu, but this movement really does need the vocal weight of an adult mezzo-soprano, as the composer intended. The choirs are well blended throughout and respond willingly to Nolan’s focused direction. This is a disc of which the performers – and Perth – can be justifiably proud.