I hesitated before pressing play – as you might when faced with the prospect of a pop song as perfect as Life on Mars being wrangled into a showpiece for an a cappella vocal group. I needn’t have. Ensemble Perspectives’ version, arranged by Philip Lawson, is as nicely done as Lawson’s arrangement of Schubert’s Die Nacht later on this eclectic disc. Ensemble Perspectives is a French-based five-piece group led by bass-baritone Geoffroy Heurard; their finely balanced, blended voices and precision of tuning mean they sound good in everything from John Tavener’s The Lamb to some 17th-century Italian polyphony by Michelangelo Rossi or Henri Salvador’s croony Syracuse. Part songs by Elgar and Sullivan should sound staid in this company, but in fact come over particularly well. A fussy arrangement of the folk song Black Is the Colour is less successful, but Jacques Brel’s Bruxelles is a whizzy showstopper. And Bowie is, of course, indestructible.
