Crowe here offers an intense and dramatic reading of the first Leçon … Elizabeth Watts takes centre stage in the second setting – her voice plummy and voluptuous … The two join in an impassioned and operatically-inspired performance of the final Leçon … the performing forces are expanded for Brossard’s highly-charged setting of the Stabat Mater, its grief-filled text delivered with raw and plangent expressivity.

a dramatic, well-paced performance that shows Brossard’s slender if learned talent to best effect. Unlike Schneebeli, who employed boy sopranos and Old French pronunciation of the Latin texts, Bates produces a more modern, full-bodied sound, and it is the grands choeurs rather than the petits choeurs that most impress.

Having two soloists of the calibre of Lucy Crowe and Elizabeth Watts ensures that the vocal line positively gleams, and there is a beautifully limpid quality throughout. They are flexible yet also a little fragile, well suited to the pleading nature of the text…Brossard’s Trio Sonatas provide some earnest instrumental variety. They're beautifully played, and the thin string tone adds a plangent air to what you find in the more explicitly penitential vocal music

Two of the UK’s finest early music voices divvy up Les Leçons de Ténèbres…Crowe is ecstatic and golden, ravishing in her upper flourishes…Watts is grainier, softer-edged, earthier. When they sing together in the third lesson, the combination is breathtaking

Bates directs some very fine performances here. Both instrumentalists and voices of La Nuova Musica are terrific as are the two soloists in the Trois Leçons de Tenebres, Lucy Crowe and Elizabeth Watts. The excellent SACD recording is set in a lovely acoustic with a real sense of presence and detail.

such an intelligent choice of voices…both with a lovely purity and clarity, both ornamenting effectively, with Crowe’s more tightly focussed sound contrasting very well with Watt’s more voluptuous tone and vibrato.