• If you haven’t come across the late medieval alabaster sculptures made mostly around Nottinghamshire, the Binchois Consort’s latest album for Hyperion, The Lily & the Rose – subtitled “Adoration of the Virgin in sound and stone” – should prompt you to seek them out. Conductor Andrew Kirkman and the consort’s six male voices explore the connections between sound and image in the “long 15th century” (c1380-1520). Sung with crystalline perfection, and recorded in the atmospheric surroundings of Ascot Priory, Berkshire, this sequence of Marian English polyphony introduces us to names, John Dunstaple aside, still not widely known: John Cooke, Walter Frye, John Bedyngham, John Plummer and more. The CD liner notes provide essays, several pictures of alabasters and all the texts. Listen and be transported.
• Six hundred years on, the musical language has changed, but not always the texts used. Choral Music by Julian Anderson (Delphian), sung with vivid assurance by the mixed-voice choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (director Geoffrey Webber), includes a Nunc dimittis and a missa brevis, Bell Mass, notable for a radiantly extended Osanna and an ecstatic Dona nobis pacem. Four American Choruses on gospel hymn texts have an incantatory, bluesy feel. Anderson (b1967) delights in splitting his singers into overlapping strands. The results are rich and engaging.
• Happening upon good classical podcasts can be a matter of chance. Radio 3 doesn’t make it easy. Going further afield, keep an eye on John Schaefer’s New Sounds podcast from WNYC Studios. His quiet advocacy is persuasive. The episode Music for Choir and Percussion features Andrew Byrne (Whispers and Cries), Daniel Lentz’s Missa Umbrarum (Mass of Shadows) and music for brass choir by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. If you have classical podcast recommendations, send them in.
