Essayist and critic George Steiner argues that serious music puts us in the presence of something that exceeds language. Sitting in Guildford Grammar Chapel on Saturday evening, with the Giovanni Consort’s male voices massing in the lower registers of Arvo Pärt’s De Profundis, one feels the force of that claim as atmospheric pressure.

Baltic Sounds, the Consort’s ambitious survey of choral music from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, is anchored in its first half by Pärt’s 1980 setting of Psalm 130, scored here for TTBB, organ and percussion. Written in his signature tintinnabuli style, the work accumulates melodic fragments suspended in a shifting prism of spacious intervals as it heads towards the inevitable climax.

In this performance from the organ loft, the men’s voices open like a fissure in the earth. As Daniel van der Moezel’s organ ostinato moves beneath like tectonic drift, the Consort produces a gravity that almost reorganises – at least in one’s mind – the Chapel’s very architecture. Pärt composed this piece a year after leaving Estonia. Something of that exile is reflected in its cry from the depths.

Giovanni Consort: Baltic Sounds. Photo © Stephanie Thyer.

The second half of the concert comprises Uģis Prauliņš’s Missa Rigensis. It proves an ideal foil: restless, dramatically alive, its harmonic colours shifting with an almost cinematic volatility that throws the Pärt’s stillness into sharp relief. Where Pärt reduces, Prauliņš proliferates – modal turns, unexpected chromatic inflections, textures that mass and loosen. What both works share is a sublime, monumental beauty.

Artistic Director Nicholas Dinopoulos draws from the ensemble a reading of real theatrical presence, sculpting each phrase, holding the work’s dramatic instincts in productive tension with the liturgical frame.

The evening’s most affecting surprise, however, is the WA premiere of Ella Macens’s When the world closes its eyes, commissioned and first performed by Sydney Chamber Choir in 2022. The Australian-Latvian composer writes with a translucent economy and folklike directness, grief and sorrow transfigured rather than translated. The Consort’s loveliness of delivery reminds one of a cupped hand holding a dove.

But it’s the unanimity of a group of individuals not so much breathing together but being breathed by something ineffable, transcendent, which constitutes the evening’s greatest achievement. Even when women’s and men’s voices sing separately, as in the two Marian works, Nijolė Sinkevičiūtė’s delicate Ave Maria (women) and Vytautas Miškinis’s Ave Maria Nr.6 (men), implicit antiphony and a stylistic grace override explicit spatial and temporal lacunae. The effect is dazzling, mesmeric.