David Lang - The Little Match Girl Passion

***** David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (Harmonia Mundi, through Ode Records)

Verdict: A Passion for our times as Hans Christian Andersen comes together with the spirit of Bach.

What have Copland's Appalachian Spring, Menotti's The Consul and David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion got in common?

All three have been awarded the coveted Pulitzer Prize in Music.

The first two works are familiar on the CD circuit and a new recording of the Lang piece by Paul Hillier and his Theatre of Voices gives us a taste of what you needed to carry off a Pulitzer in 2008.

This a work that, in a sense, spans four centuries.

The spirit of the great Bach hovers over it as Lang blends his own settings of texts familiar from his St Matthew Passion with his telling of the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The scene is set with the lapping and overlapping lines of "Come daughter" ("Komm tochter" in the original Bach), playing out over the insistent drum of bass Jakob Bloch.

Another familiar Bach text, "Erbarme dich", reconceived as "Have Mercy, My God", is an ecstatic mantra of voices and tubular bells.

These provide the frame and context for Andersen's tragic story of the selfless little girl who eventually dies in the snow; a story which Lang feels is the perfect balance of horror and beauty, of suffering and hope.

Andersen's words, in prose, are intriguingly treated, from our first glimpse of the waif with her slipperless feet, "quite red and blue with the cold". The final vision is of her corpse, sung in fragmented phrases, which start dispassionately but receive their full spiritual import in the singers' final obsession with the words, "Rest soft", the familiar "Ruhe sanft" from the final chorus of the St Matthew Passion.

You may need to sit for a moment, or quite a few moments, to contemplate and indeed come to terms with the impact of Lang's 35-minute Passion. When you have, the final four tracks of the disc offer yet more beauties - four of the composer's very personal minimalist motets, performed by the voices of the wonderful Ars Nova Copenhagen.

William Dart