James Primosch: Carthage

James Primosch’s music deals with the spiritual battle between certainty and doubt, and in the title piece with the role of love and imagination in a devastated world. Its text comes from novelist Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Other texts here are drawn from Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Denise Levertov, the Latin Mass and, on ‘spiralling ecstatically’, e.e. cummings. Few composers could pull this offwithout sounding a bit pi, and few choirs could deliver it without a suspicion of cassocks and harps, but Donald Nally and The Crossing recognise the jazz fan in Primosch and give these astonishing works an earthy sway and groundedness that only enhances their essential spirituality. Neither composer nor choir is exactly short of accolades, but this bids fair to be contemporary choral record of the year.

BRIAN MORTON Read the full review on Agora Classica