“Severe but extremely impartial” is how composer Lennox Berkeley once summed up Nadia Boulanger, the fearsome Parisian pedagogue with whom he had studied in the 1920s, and who was likely responsible for his becoming a Catholic at the end of that decade. Similar sentiments apply to his sparse and astringent Stabat Mater from the late 40s: six solo voice and 12 instrumentalists weaving together a solemn sort of neo-classicism, all jagged-edged mysticism and glimmering triads. There’s earnest beauty in it and the instrumental playing on this recording is spot on – the Berkeley Ensemble under David Wordsworth clinches the balance of chaste, plaintive and urgent – while the young early-music voices of the Marian Consort sound well-behaved but a bit thin for the more thuddingly gothic moments. They’re better-suited to the sinewy a-cappella Mass for Five Voices, or to the spindly arabesques of the last piece on the disc, Touch Light, by Lennox’s son Michael.
