Back in March 2023 we enthusiastically welcomed an Easter-themed ‘choral narrative’ entitled ‘The Lamb’s Journey’, remarkable not just for the quality of the female-voice choir Ensemble Altera’s singing, but also for the intelligence with which the programme had been masterminded by its director, Christopher Lowrey. The same qualities are on abundant display in their new Christmas release (also on the Alpha Classics label), ‘Feminine Voices at Christmas’. Recorded in the radiant, highly sympathetic acoustic of the Blessed Sacrament Church in Providence, Rhode Island, it opens with a gently luminous account of Hildegard von Bingen’s salutation to the Virgin, O viridissima virga, and closes with an arrangement of Tomorrow shall be my dancing day by ‘the king of Yule himself’ (Lowrey’s words), John Rutter, who this year celebrated his 80th birthday.

In between these works is a marvellous cornucopia of seasonal pieces for upper voices, mainly contemporary and 20th-century, many of them by women composers, highlighting their historical marginalisation and more recent happy proliferation. The framing movements of Imogen Holst’s Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow, keenly accompanied and enlivened by Lishan Tan’s nimble harp playing, reflect on the joyous and introspective poles of emotion experienced in the festive season, but also evoke the changing of the seasons and the renewal of nature. Holst’s father, Gustav, is represented by a movement from his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda for the same scoring, ‘Hymn to the Dawn’. Although overlooked by Lowrey in his otherwise excellent and extensive booklet notes, this track is one of the disc’s highlights, the exquisitely deployed dissonances benefitting from expert intonation, combining purity and warmth of tone.

With the Magnificat setting from Joanna Marsh’s St Paul’s Service we enter a more sombre soundworld, owing much to Marsh’s absorption of elements from Tudor music. The organ accompaniment (played by James Kennerley) adds an inexorability to the music’s progress, yet there’s also subtlety and sensitivity, both in the word-setting and in the shaping of phrases and overall form of this canticle, so deeply bound to the season of Advent. Another Marian text is the Ave Maria (based on Mary’s biblical welcome by her cousin Elizabeth), heard here in a hauntingly plaintive a cappella setting by Cecilia McDowall, its chains of suspensions, modal harmonies and subtle dissonances creating a mesmerising atmosphere.

Adrian Peacock’s setting of the medieval text There is no rose (also unaccompanied) has a similarly introspective feeling, its textures gradually burgeoning, with a wonderfully ecstatic, concentrated climax giving way to a more tender close. Further extending the Marian theme is the 15th-century carol I sing of a maiden, celebrating the Annunciation. The scoring of Ian Shaw’s setting is for a single soprano line, yet the shaping of the melody, with often wide leaps and enchanting harmonic turns, is utterly magical.

A single soprano (accompanied by organ) opens Barbara Strozzi’s O Maria quam pulchra es, then joined in unison by the other sopranos, yet the sensitivity of the setting and phrasing, with delicately supportive harmonies represents (as Lowrey rightly observes) ‘baroque prosody and vocalism at its transcendent apogee’. Kerensa Briggs’s version of the well-known Coventry Carol also begins with a solo voice (plus harp accompaniment), yet it soon opens out into richly comforting harmonies. Starting at the second verse, this has a more soothing mood than usual for this sometimes disturbing text related to Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents.

Since its 1967 television broadcast as part of the Carols from King’s, Elizabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ the Apple Tree has become a firm festive favourite. Ensemble Altera’s version for upper voices is one of the most enthralling versions now available, wonderfully contained yet richly expressive, although the canonic version of the final version which flags up in his booklet notes sadly doesn’t materialise. Britten’s ‘New Year Carol’ from his Friday Afternoons song collection (1933–35), performed here with gently-strummed harp accompaniment, has a marvellously wistful air to it, reflecting the mixture of hope and regret that many will feel at the turning of the year.

Before the album’s main work, Lishan Tan gets a well-earned moment in the spotlight with the hypnotically lilting Lento from Germaine Tailleferre’s Sonata for solo harp (1952), with its subtle Hispanic suggestions and artfully placed moments of increased passion. Its final evaporation makes a nice lead-in to the plainchant first movement of Britten’s celebrated Ceremony of Carols which (as Lowrey points out) was originally conceived with female voices in mind. The extra security and tonal nuance of Ensemble Altera’s marvellously assured and sensitive performance speaks for itself. It ranges from the exuberance of ‘Wolcum Yole!’, through the swaying of ‘There is no Rose’, the pure joy of ‘As Dew in Aprille’ and the infectious rhythms of ‘This Little Babe’ with its catchy close canons, to the delicious harp swirls of the ‘Spring Carol’ and the exultant cries of ‘Deo gracias!’ in an ecstatic account of ‘Adam lay i-bounden’. Thrillingly directed, and expertly shaped and paced by Lowrey, it sets the cap on a Christmas disc of exceptional interest, standing out from the many that are released every year. Don’t miss it!