There is an art to programming a disc that ranges across ten centuries without sounding like a curated playlist — one that makes a twelfth-century Hildegard antiphon and a twenty-first-century MacMillan motet feel like inevitable neighbours rather than polite strangers sharing a bench. The Gesualdo Six have been refining this art across ten Hyperion releases, and Radiant Dawn, their most recent, is arguably the disc where the strategy pays its fullest dividend. The concept is elemental — light, in all its registers, from solstice-warm summer dusk through moonlight to the blazing, eschatological radiance of Advent — and its realisation is, without overstating the case, stunning.
What holds a programme this wide-ranging together is the thread of plainchant that Owain Park weaves through the sequence, not as archaeological ornament but as a structural spine. When a chant item leads into Tallis’s O nata lux de lumine — a piece whose false relations already feel like light bending through a prism — the effect is of continuous revelation rather than juxtaposition. And when that same harmonic world then opens onto James MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn, the Strathclyde Motet that gives the album its name, the continuity becomes unmistakable: MacMillan absorbed Tallis, Tallis absorbed plainchant, and these six voices make the chain of inheritance audible in real time.
The Gesualdo Six are not a homogeneous ensemble in the sense of smoothing every individual voice into a collective blur. Two countertenors, two tenors, baritone and bass: each voice retains something of its own colour, and Park uses that variety to differentiate the layering of polyphony with unusual transparency. In Tallis’s Dum transisset sabbatum, phrases emerge from the texture and dissolve back into it with a naturalness that speaks of singers who have spent a long time listening to one another rather than simply coordinating. The group’s intonation is, by any standard, extraordinary — but it is never merely an athletic exhibition; it is always in the service of something expressive.
What distinguishes this disc from its siblings in the Gesualdo Six catalogue is the addition of trumpeter Matilda Lloyd, who joins roughly half the programme. This is not an unambiguous gain. Lloyd is a player of real character and precision, and in MacMillan’s In splendoribus sanctorum and Judith Bingham’s Enter Ghost her contributions are genuinely electrifying — the brass writing here is angular, questioning, old and new simultaneously, and she meets it with a tone that blends warmth with edge. But in a handful of quieter, more inward tracks her presence can feel like an intrusion into an acoustic world that was already complete. When the six voices alone are navigating Hildegard’s O gloriosissimi — that wandering, searching melody descending repeatedly just short of its final note before resolving upward — the addition of brass, however sensitively played, would be an irrelevance. Park is wise enough to know this: the solo choral tracks are left alone, and the disc breathes accordingly.
The contemporary commissions demonstrate both the strengths and the occasional limits of this kind of programming. MacMillan is in his element here, and both Strathclyde Motets glow with the authority of a composer who has spent forty years learning how to make modern harmonic language feel inevitable inside a liturgical frame. Owain Park’s own Sommernacht is quietly lovely, all luminous chords and soft landing. Deborah Pritchard’s The Light Thereof and Richard Barnard’s Aura are less memorable — competent, tasteful, but they don’t quite earn their place among the stronger works. Arlene Roth’s Night Prayer and Eleanor Daley’s Grandmother Moon, the latter setting a Mi’kmaq text of real beauty, add breadth to what might otherwise risk becoming an exclusively Anglo-Catholic soundworld. Geoffrey Burgon’s 1979 a cappella Nunc dimittis brings the disc to a close with something approaching serenity.
The recording, made at All Hallows, Gospel Oak, is warmly spacious without blurring the ensemble’s characteristic transparency. Hyperion’s engineers have placed the singers close enough that individual voices are distinguishable — a crucial choice for music this polyphonically complex — while preserving the sense of a real acoustic space holding everything together.
This is, in the end, a disc about the relationship between the very old and the very new: not as a formal experiment but as a living practice, the way a singing community has always worked. The Gesualdo Six don’t make that argument abstractly; they embody it, phrase by phrase, across seventy minutes of music that continues to give up new things on repeated hearings.
Comparisons
For a different approach to the voices-and-trumpet combination in sacred music — bolder and more abrasive — try Jordi Savall’s various programmes with Hespèrion XXI mixing plainchant with Renaissance polyphony and early brass: Search Apple Music Classical Search Qobuz
For the most directly comparable Gesualdo Six release — essentially the same programme philosophy applied to the Epiphany season — their 2023 Morning Star is essential listening: Search Apple Music Classical Search Qobuz
