Weir: Choral Music – review

There are a number of large-scale choral works in Judith Weir's output, but the Caius choir's survey includes everything she has composed for unaccompanied choir and for choir with just a single instrument. That's usually an organ, but in one piece here, the most recent, a setting of Psalm 148 from 2008, it's a solo trombone, while in another, the three tiny songs of Little Tree, she uses a marimba as her own version of a continuo instrument. The pieces in the collection range across a quarter of a century – the earliest, Ascending into Heaven, was composed for the St Alban's Organ festival in 1983 – but what they all have in common is the wonderful clarity of Weir's choral writing and the cool lucidity and economy of her harmonic world. Every syllable of the text is distinct in these performances, and the textures never waste a note. It's a beautifully crafted body of work, a model of choral understatement that other contemporary British choral composers could well learn from.