When Accentus released their first “Transcriptions” disc, I described it as “a stunning display of choral technique and control” (Naïve, A/03). The second, which appeared three years later (2/07), was equally impressive, not so much in the quality of the singing itself – something which we take almost for granted from this matchless French a cappella group – but in Laurence Equilbey’s skill in creating quasi-instrumental timbres and effects from her singers. As examples of great (and I use the word deliberately) choral singing and intense musicianship, these discs remain in a class of their own.

What we have here are several tracks taken from those two discs and turned, as Andy Sommer writes in the lavish booklet (some 60 pages of artistic excellence in its own right), into “a sort of a cappella musical”. That probably doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer beauty of his film, in which, superimposed onto the soundtrack, are shots of Equilbey working in her Montmartre studio with its stunning views over Paris, shots of the choir in rehearsal and in concert (and in a very Stalinesque concrete bunker), and shots of isolated city- and seascapes.

The visuals are, like the music, continually shifting, with subtly changing lighting and a constantly roving camera which wafts gently past the singers but never lingers. No close-ups of singers in action, just occasional faces gently mouthing to the soundtrack and images of the choir as if seen from the wings. Sommer gives us a few real masterstrokes too: a singer seen through a page of Schubert’s Grablied, as if revealing the music’s inner soul, a conductor clawing at iron bars as if trying to release the essence of the Mahler Adagietto. With a single extra scene – Ravel’s Soupir provided as a kind of encore – this is, visually and aurally, a DVD of exceptional artistry.