On track: Power to reflect and hope

Ikon is a collection of deeply spiritual music from Britain's premier chamber choir, The Sixteen, under the direction of its founder, Harry Christophers.

The CD cover is beautifully chosen, showing a detail from an unidentified icon, on which time has taken its inevitable toll. The distressed surface on the face could well be tears.

An overpowering humanity is at work here, a primal truth that is caught in Christophers' introduction to the CD booklet.

"Once again it is the human voice that allows us to express ourselves in ways that affect us deeply," he writes.

"Ikon gives us the power to remember, to reflect, to hope and ultimately to rejoice. The composers featured here are from differing traditions but all speak with the same passion and conviction.

"All let the language create the music and thus allow the music to enter our hearts."

All of which is certainly so, although there is a bias towards Russia and Eastern Europe, opening with a resonant extract from Rachamninov's Vespers and including hymn settings by composers such as Stravinsky, Chesnokov, Kalinnikov - not to mention the contemporary Estonian Arvo Part.

Part's three pieces include a highly atmospheric De Profundis, sung over Huw Williams' finely pointed organ lines.

In this context, Holst's Nunc Dimittis with its long, drawn-out suspensions and sighing dissonances is a perfect soulmate for its Slavic companions. The choir, immaculate throughout, are particularly glorious here when the women's voices rise from the general choral texture. Throughout, the ever-changing vocal colours are perfectly gradated.

Contemporary English composers are represented by John Tavener, with his well-known Song for Athene written for Princess Diana's funeral, while from across the border there is James MacMillan with A Child's Prayer.

This intensely simple work, with exquisitely gauged dissonances, seems to echo back from the heavens themselves thanks to the spacious acoustics of St Giles Cripplegate and the expertise of the recording team.

The curiosity for many will be the two Stravinsky settings, a Pater Noster from 1926 and Ave Maria written eight years later. They are veritable gems, throwing invaluable light on the composer's bigger and better-known choral works.

* Ikon (UCJ 476 3160, through Universal Music)