At the heart of this album – designed to accompany The Sixteen’s 2025 Choral Pilgrimage – sits music by Arvo Pärt, who will celebrate his 90th birthday in September. The unassuming Grand Old Man of Western Music has been consistently championed by Harry Christophers over the years and here are three works to cleanse ears, mind and soul. Best known is the 1989 setting of the Magnificat in Latin, which is performed with great clarity and a proper sense of Marian devotion. Less familiar is Tribute to Caesar, a companion piece to The Woman with the Alabaster Box (recorded by The Sixteen in 2012) and both written to mark the 350th anniversary of the Karlstadt Episcopacy in Sweden in 1997. Sadly appropriate to our troubled times is the wonderful Da pacem Domine, composed for Jordi Savall in the wake of the 2004 Madrid train bombings and resonating with austere beauty and compassion. The intense care with which Pärt selects his notes is matched here to performances of perfect transparency and tonal balance.

This 2025 programme divides into two halves designed with Christophers’s meticulous care for symmetry and a culminating sense of unity from contrast. Hildegard of Bingen’s great Ave, generosa is split to open each half and provides an inimitable grounding of monody (accompanied here by a drone shared by voices and violin) to enable Pärt’s sparse harmony to emerge with a clear focus. The presence of Sarah Sexton’s violin provides a creative link to the commissions from Will Todd and Anna Clyne that come after Pärt’s music in each section. There is nothing here to frighten the horses and many listeners will find these pieces reassuring. Todd’s meaningful setting of verses by St John Henry Newman provides the title for the album as a whole – Let me be an angel of peace – and will attract anyone who enjoys Rutter with a touch of extra spice. Clyne’s setting of words by Rainer Maria Rilke blends neo-medievalism with minimalism in a style that could sit easily as an evocative television soundtrack. Both works employ Sexton’s violin to telling effect, Todd as commentary and Clyne as accompaniment, and she plays with mesmerising individuality.

The album’s two sections culminate in glorious votive antiphons by John Taverner that show The Sixteen at the top of their traditional game. Gaude plurimum flows with both ease and ecstasy, and demonstrates that miraculous blend of harmony emerging from counterpoint which makes this music such a feast for the senses. Devotion to the Virgin animates the music, and being devotional in intent rather than liturgical (sung at the end of Compline) it will fit perfectly into the context of a Choral Pilgrimage to a great religious building. O splendor gloriae honours the Trinity and is well known for being – possibly – partly by Christopher Tye, but this matters little in that this is another pinnacle of early 16th-century choral writing and it brings an exhilarating album to a sumptuous climax. Pilgrims should flock to any centre where this music is performed in 2025.