This second disc by high-class chamber-choir newcomers Ora draws together a varied but effortlessly coherent programme around Psalm 50 – the Miserere – and the writings of Savonarola, the 15th-century Florentine priest and reformer burnt for heresy. If the choir’s version of the Allegri Miserere sounds slightly unfamiliar, that’s because Ora use for the first few verses a new edition correcting a supposed transcription error; the “wrong” version, with its stratospheric high C, is heard later. The rest of the disc similarly merges old and new. The bookend to the Allegri is James MacMillan’s Miserere from 2009; at the centre of the programme are two versions of Infelix Ego, with a new, sliding and sighing setting by Ēriks Ešenvalds seeming almost to grow out of the 16th-century one by Byrd. Everything here is heard to best advantage, thanks to the choir’s clean, supple singing under Suzi Digby’s direction.
