There’s something strangely captivating about hearing Jan Garbarek and the Hilliards chase each other across the centuries to the music of the 13th-century European composer Pérotin. The frisson created between the Hilliards’ chaste vocalising and the raw wailing of Garbarek’s saxophone manifests as scared versus profane, like a chilled jazzer idling against a church wall, his brow shaded by a well-worn trilby, improvising effortlessly while choristers intone the word of God.

The programme here ranges from Byzantine chant, through dancing Pérotin to two richly harmonised works of Garbarek’s own devising, the second, We are the stars, one of the programme’s undoubted highlights. Pivotal to the whole enterprise is the music of the 20th-century Armenian priest, composer, choir leader, singer, music ethnologist, music pedagogue and musicologist Komitas Vardapet, whose exotic modes set Garbarek off on ecstatic solo flights of fancy. Of particular interest is a trio of pieces that meld into a seamless 15-minute sequence, with an eight-minute piece “from the Lipovan Old Believers tradition” sandwiched between a Litany by Rimsky student Kedrov and an anonymous Dostonio est. Arvo Pärt’s Most Holy Mother of God is uncharacteristically varied in tempo and harmony, and sits well in its present context. As with its predecessors “Officium” (10/94) and “Mnemosyne” (5/99), “Officium Novum” circulates in the Austrian monastery of St Gerold where producer Manfred Eicher harnesses the generous and accommodating acoustic to bewitching effect. It’s a pretty seductive formula that still creates a fair measure of magic. You might not want to hear it every day but there will be some days when you’ll want to hear little else.