Missa Brevis (2017)

I associate Thea Musgrave with avant-garde musical adventures, but this choral program reveals a startling range of style and sensibility, from the daring to the disarmingly conservative... After these complex layered pieces [Rorate Coeli and The Voices of Our Ancestors], so full of effects, the most recent work, Missa Brevis, from 2018, comes as a relief, a point of relaxation. It’s like a master painter showing she can do a simple sketch. It is homophonic, diatonic, and heartfelt. The Sanctus has a sweet innocence, the Agnus Dei a ghostlike stillness; the soloists have an angelic purity.