The Crossing are a leading chamber choir, comprising 24 singers, who won Grammy Awards in 2018 and 2019 for two of their more than 20 recordings. From the outset of the first track, Toivo Tulev’s motet A child said, what is the grass?, their vocal clarity, superb tone and ensemble are fully in evidence, traits maintained throughout what is a challenging work and programme. Premiered in 2015, it sets words from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in a beautifully gentle yet intense single movement. Tulev’s music is often pluralistic in style; here, the music lies towards the atonal end of the free tonality spectrum but the harmonic logic is wonderfully clear. A child said, what is the grass? is very affectingly sung here, a showcase for The Crossing without sounding like one.

Gregory Spears’s The Tower and the Garden (2018) is a four-movement suite for chorus and string quartet. The style is more traditionally tonal, the string quartet a partner to the voices rather than ‘mere’ accompanists. The central movements set poems by Denise Levertov – treating the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for the dangers of unchecked technological advance – and Keith Garebian, musing on Derek Jarman’s garden, which acted as a refuge in his final illness. These are framed by two settings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s poem ‘80’, an ‘eschatalogical meditation on Gethsemane’. A joint commission with two other choirs, it was The Crossing who gave the premiere and provide a compelling account for its first recording.

Joel Puckett (b1977, like Spears) was a name new to me. His motet I enter the earth (2015) is a real find, setting a text from a Botswanan tribe. The naturalistic words put me in mind of some of the aboriginal-derived texts that have been set by Australian composers, though the chordal harmonies have resonances at several removes of Ligeti’s Lux aeterna. It is beautifully sung.