From religious processions to military victories, the combination of voices and trumpet has played a prominent role in concerts and ritual for centuries. We have found it a joy to work with trumpeter Matilda Lloyd to bring this programme to life, alongside several composers who have created new pieces for this collection.

On this album, we explore different shades of light through music, capturing moments across the spectrum, from the soft, golden glow of a summer evening as shadows lengthen to the shimmering of moonlight on calm waters. Some texts contrast the terror of darkness with the brilliance of dazzling sunlight; others explore the blurred boundaries between heaven and earth. Plainchant threads this programme together—sometimes finely woven into the structural framework, and at other times as a fragment of the composer’s imagination.

Alec Roth’s Night prayer reflects on the Compline hymn Te lucis ante terminum, a favourite with composers for its contemplative, scalic lines. Each verse presents the Latin text as a two-part canon, which weaves in and out of the English translation. The Latin and English chants unfold at different speeds, creating an interplay that blurs the vocal lines, ethereal as lingering incense. In the final verse the trumpet soars luminously above the voices as an instrumental ‘vocalise’ and descant.

The intimate and prayerful text of O nata lux originates from the tenth century and is traditionally associated with the Feast of the Transfiguration, which commemorates the moment in the Gospels when the disciples witness Jesus radiant with divine light, clothed in angelic splendour. In his setting, Thomas Tallis captures the text’s spiritual intensity in music that is both passionate and harmonically rich. A hallmark of his style, the use of false relations—bristling clashes between chromatically opposing notes—adds a disorienting feeling as the harmonic ground momentarily shifts.

Grandmother moon is a setting of a mystical text by Mary Louise Martin, a Mi’kmaq poet who lives on a small island in British Columbia. Her words describe the serene beauty and tranquillity of a full moon on a clear night, and the poem closes with the word ‘we’lalin’, an expression of gratitude in the Mi’kmaq language. Eleanor Daley paints a vivid musical landscape, using arch-shaped musical phrases which evoke the soft dappling of moonlight on murmuring waters.

Deborah Pritchard’s setting of words from the Book of Revelation explores searching for light, with the music gradually building in expressive intensity. Trumpet and voices begin The light thereof in an elegiac dialogue, gradually unify, then finally conclude in a quiet, meditative texture where the use of muted trumpet evokes delicate light. Commissioned by the artists in 2020, this work received its premiere at the Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg, Sweden.

The text for O radiant dawn is traditionally sung during Advent as one of the ‘Great O’ antiphons used in the seven days leading up to Christmas. In his setting from the second set of ‘Strathclyde motets’, James MacMillan draws harmonic inspiration from Thomas Tallis’s O nata lux, blending it with insistent, ascending repetitions which depict the people’s desperate cries for Christ’s presence. Hear how the repeated chords which build up from ‘come, shine on those who dwell in darkness’ sound like emerging light. The structure of the work enhances its emotional depth: the outer sections are scored for four voices, while the inner verse is reduced to two vocal lines, creating a stark textural contrast. This simplicity is further heightened by the use of wide intervals—sixths and sevenths—evoking the struggle of a people walking in darkness.

In Dum transisset Sabbatum, Thomas Tallis perfectly paints the image of a bright Easter Morning, as the gloom of Lent is finally replaced by the new season’s joy. The melismatic setting of the chant in the top voice lends itself to instrumental performance, with serene, unbroken melodic lines, rather than the text, at the forefront for the listener. Meanwhile, the lower voices dance beneath, cultivating scalic lines which are punctuated by yearning leaps—listen for the moment Tallis chooses to highlight ‘emerunt aromata’ (‘bought aromatic oils’) with a series of fragrant triadic gestures that ripple through the voices. The interplay between these two textures creates a gentle yet persistent sense of forward momentum, culminating in the triumphant final ‘Alleluia’.

Twelfth-century polymath and religious icon Saint Hildegard of Bingen was a prolific composer of devotional pieces. The hallmarks of her enduring compositional style permeate O gloriosissimi. Each phrase begins with a wandering series of notes, as if posing a question. The compass is continually developing, evoking a searching light which gradually consumes the shadows. Hildegard creates a sense of inevitability by repeatedly descending just below the expected final pitch of each phrase, before resolving upwards to a satisfactory conclusion. The result is a deeply questioning yet radiantly exploratory experience for the listener.

Roxanna Panufnik’s O hearken started life as a raffle ticket prize at Westminster Abbey Choir School’s 2015 Summer Fête. Initially promised as a fanfare, the raffle winner, Pamela Carrington, encouraged the composer to write a new composition for the Westminster Abbey Choir. At Director James O’Donnell’s request, the resulting introit was crafted to be celebratory and concise, with a dreamy middle section surrounded by bright, punchy harmonies. The central passage evokes the lingering scent of recently burned incense, rising and mingling in the church rafters as the light gradually fades.

English Renaissance composer Robert White wrote four settings of the Lenten Compline hymn Christe, qui lux es et dies, all based on the traditional chant melody. This second version is a beautiful polyphonic working of the chant, which exists in its true form in the top part, performed here on trumpet. In contrast to the intricate lower parts, the chant line is spacious, with each note given equal length, providing the composer with plenty of room to shape the harmony in each verse. White chooses scale-driven material for the first two polyphonic verses, while for the phrase ‘Memento nostri, Domine’ (‘Remember us, Lord’) he introduces a more questioning, angular series.

Richard Barnard’s Aura sets the poem of the same name by Emily Berry from her 2017 poetry collection ‘Stranger, Baby’, which poignantly explores the loss of the poet’s mother. The poem’s striking layout—unpunctuated phrases split between two columns—mirrors the emotional fragmentation at the heart of the work. As the text progresses, the gap between the columns—the fading boundary between ‘the living & the dead’—dissolves. The singers are divided into two groups, each representing one side of the text, highlighting the theme of separation. The trumpet acts as a bridge between the two, eventually merging with the voices to create a shimmering aura that envelops the entire ensemble.

Judith Bingham’s 2002 interpretation of a passage from Hamlet, Enter Ghost, blends music and spoken word into a mesmerizing exploration of Shakespeare’s timeless tale. We hear fragments of Act 1 Scenes 4 and 5: the appearance of the ghost of King Hamlet, and the revelation of his murder at the hands of his brother Claudius. Bingham skilfully captures the play’s dramatic storytelling through dance-like, motoric rhythms using the extremes of the trumpet’s range.

My piece Sommernacht was commissioned by the StimmGold Vokalensemble as a response to a song by Max Reger. Gertrud Triepel’s evocative poem delicately captures a summer evening, comparing the tugging of a breeze to the pull of homesick heartstrings. I aimed to channel the languid nature of Reger’s original in a re-imagined choral work, mimicking hazy piano writing with voices fading in and out of focus. Guided by the original harmonic patterns, chromatic twists and turns re-shape the chords, transfiguring them between vocal lines. Unlike the original, Sommernacht features no lead singer. Instead, the voices share the spotlight, engaging in a conversational interplay as if exchanging stories around a fire. As the music gently drifts into the distance, the voices begin to murmur, lulling themselves into a tranquil slumber.

The first version of Abendlied was composed in 1855 when Josef Rheinberger was just fifteen years old. It is perhaps his most famous choral work, paying homage to the great sacred music of the Renaissance with short moments of imitative writing blended with glorious homophony. The text is set primarily in a syllabic style, providing poetic clarity, with the phrase ‘Bleib bei uns’ (‘Stay with us’) repeated three times as a structural anchor. As evening approaches—‘und der Tag hat sich geneiget’ (‘and the day has concluded’)—the text is passed between the voices, flowing downwards from the highest voice, conjuring an image of the sun dropping lower and lower in the sky before disappearing below the horizon.

In splendoribus sanctorum is a meditative work from the ‘Strathclyde motets’ by James MacMillan. The short text is taken from Psalm 109, and is sung during Communion at Midnight Mass on the Feast of the Nativity. Here, voices and trumpet respond to each other; simple chant-like passages for the singers are contrasted with a ravishing trumpet obbligato, which gradually ebbs away. In concert, we would usually perform this piece last, walking away from the stage and disappearing from view, the music almost a memory for the audience.

British composer Geoffrey Burgon conceived his Nunc dimittis for the BBC’s acclaimed dramatization of John le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The accompanying voices slowly oscillate between tonal centres, as a solo voice interacts with the trumpet. The magic of this setting is its inherent positivity—each line ends with a short series of ascending notes, as if Simeon is lifting his hands into the air in praise of the new-born Christ.

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