My impression after a cursory first encounter with Carl Rutti’s choral music was that here was another in the mould of Tavener, Part and Gorecki whose intense spirituality might seem in danger of perverting the course of musical development. But within a few seconds of starting this disc I realized I could not have been more wrong; indeed as I write this the disc is on its eighth repeat and I still find new wonders revealed at each hearing – and I don’t think a critic could give higher praise than that.
True, the rich, static blocks of consonant harmony shimmering in ethereal mists will draw into this music those who find satisfaction in such things, but those looking for more complex musical stimulation will be amply rewarded both by the sheer luxuriance of Rutti’s harmonic vocabulary and his vital sense of rhythm (the Mass ends with a frenzied quasi-African dance setting the words “Ite missa est”). When I read Chris de Souza’s very personal notes on the disc and saw that, inspired by the mention in St Luke’s gospel of two sacrificial pigeons, Rutti had incorporated a pair of vocalized pigeon calls into into his Nunc dimittis, I was expecting something embarrassingly naive. The pigeon calls are obvious enough but so ingeniously are they woven into the fabric of the music that the effect is as moving as anything Messiaen did with bird-song: and these are not birds of the Javanese-yellow-throated-fly-catcher-at-5.00am variety but your common-or-garden 24-hour Trafalgar Square pigeons.
The Trafalgar Square allusion is no idle jibe. At de Souza’s suggestion a Nunc dimittis was added to the Magnificat, conforming to the Anglican office of Evensong and Rutti is clearly strongly drawn towards the English choral tradition. His Missa brevis, written in 1980 for Brompton Oratory choir, has been expanded (with an electrifying “Gloria”) into the Missa angelorum, a title that pays homage both to Angels and to England. The music is sumptuous – there’s no other word for it. I urge all lovers of choral music to go out and buy this disc straight away, not least because of the incredible richness and intensity of tone Stephen Jackson draws from the large but far from unwieldy BBC Symphony Chorus.'