I’ve long admired and respected the work of Neil McEwan and his accomplished choir at Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney. This disc is a fine celebration of McEwan’s scholarly expertise in the area of Gregorian chant with his dedicated ‘chant schola’. 

What makes this disc particularly interesting is the premiere recording of eight items from the Rimini Antiphonal, a 14th-century chant book housed in the State Library of New South Wales. McEwan transcribed these chants and prepared them for performance. Other chants from the regular plainsong repertory as well as three polyphonic motets and two chants by Hildegard of Bingen make for a pleasantly varied program. Performances are enhanced by the atmospheric but not overwhelmingly reverberant acoustic of the chapel at St Scholastica’s Convent, Glebe.

McEwan elicits the necessary flexibility from his male singers in the chant. Their occasional bursts of vocal fervour are understandable. Robert White’s Christe qui lux es et dies, Taverner’s Dum transisset Sabbatum and Byrd’s Laetentur caeli provide an appropriate change of texture along the way. These motets are sung with clarity and precision.

Hildegard’s chants, O tu suavissima virga and O eterne Deus add yet another dimension to the program. The addition of a gamba drone and light percussion to the wonderful soaring female voices helps suspend the listener between time and space. Here is a worthy and welcome contribution to the chant discography.

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