Originally founded a generation ago as the Bevan Family Choir, and now into its second generation, the Bevan Family Consort – numbering no fewer than 17 voices from the same family! – releases its third CD on the Signum Classics label. Their best-known members are, of course, star sopranos Sophie and Mary Bevan, but all the others are professional or accomplished amateur musicians. Under the expert direction of Graham Ross (familiar on disc from his role as music director of Clare College, Cambridge), they produce a marvellously blended sound, as much at home in complex Renaissance polyphony as in 20th- and 21st-century works. Their previous two releases presented programmes centred on mass settings. For their new release, the logistics of gathering together singers who had various professional commitments results in a somewhat more varied recital.

Nevertheless, this programme of music for Lent and Passiontide is well-planned, proceeding from Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, via Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter) to a selection from the enormous repertoire of works composed for Holy Week. The three days of the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday) – the climax of the Holy Week observances – here each contain settings of the Lamentations for the appropriate Tenebrae service, as well as three contrasting settings of the Holy Week text Christus factus est. The result forms an impressively cogent whole, while containing plenty of stylistic and textural variety.

The programme opens with the plainchant Lenten prose Attende Domine from which the album takes its title, alternating between pairs of cantors (male and female) for the verses and the larger choir in the refrain. While not employing the rhythmicised approach to chant of some more revisionist performances, the lines are sensitively phrased, easing the listener into the soundworld of the disc as a whole.

The first polyphonic item is William Byrd’s motet Tribulatio proxima est, which combines verses from Psalms 21 and 69 with his own free text. One of the composer’s finest works, it here takes on a wonderfully warm, devotional sound, with just enough delicacy to hint at the penitential mood of Lent. Lush, gently spiced harmonies woven around a chant tune characterise the setting of the Marian antiphon Ave regina cælorum by Neil Wright, a friend of Bevan family patriarch David Bevan (1951–2021). That plush sound also seeps into the performance of the Ash Wednesday responsory Emendemus in melius by late Renaissance composer Andrea Rota (c.1553–1597). One can perhaps imagine a more Italianate performance that would point up more dynamic contrast, but not such a lovingly shaped or beautifully sung one.

David Bevan’s setting of Psalm 22 ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Psalm 21 in the Vulgate numbering) is the responsorial psalm for Palm Sunday. A fauxbordon setting, its biting dissonances (quite different from some of the more familiar triumphalist music for Palm Sunday) are brought home with singing of intense passion, making the most of every harmonic inflection.

The programme then moves to Maundy Thursday, beginning with the extended six-voice Lamentations of Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder (a contemporary of Byrd). The sumptuous harmonic cascades of the melismas on the Hebrew letters that head each verse are sung with a gentle intensity that emphasises the sheer beauty of this marvellous work. Then comes the first of the settings of Christus factus est, by Baldassare Sartori (fl.1689–1716), a familiar work formerly misattributed to Felice Anerio, and exquisitely sung here. Two 20th-century French works – Maurice Duruflé’s richly-harmonised Ubi caritas and Mel Bonis’s tender yet ecstatic Tantum ergo – frame a rarity from the early Italian Baroque: Girolamo Giacobbi’s remarkable Caro mea vere est cibus (‘My flesh is meat indeed’), sung here by lower voices which highlight its opulent harmonies.

Good Friday opens with the Lamentations sung to a Toledo chant from the Passionarium Toletanium, and performed solo with extraordinary style and musicality by tenor Dominic Bevan. Another French item – Poulenc’s fervent Vinea me electa from his Four Penitential Motets – precedes the very different but no less impassioned strains of Mendelssohn’s eight-voice Am Charfreitag, a German version of Christus factus est. The purity of Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord comes as a welcome contrast, but it builds to a heartfelt climax. Colin Mawby’s Reproaches encompass a range of textures, dynamics and skilfully deployed dissonances that far outweigh their relatively brief duration; the performance is as compelling as one could wish, and the sopranos (in this case, Daisy and Mary) are outstanding. They also take the top lines in Antonio Lotti’s ever-popular Crucifixus a 8, in an account that maximises the expressivity while giving a forward momentum to the chains of harmonic sequences (as at ‘sub Pontio Pilato’), and finding mournful repose at the final ‘et sepultus est’.

The disc ends with two particular highlights. Skilfully reconstructed by the Consort’s resident musicologist and countertenor, Francis Bevan, Alonso Lobo’s Lamentation for double choir (only the first choir parts have survived) is a wonder of Spanish Renaissance polyphony, and it is magnificently sustained across its 13-minute span by singing of blazing commitment and thrilling ardour. Francis’s hope that the reconstructed piece might enter the standard repertoire is one that we second, though there’s nothing ‘standard’ about the quality of the music! Finally, a bicentenary tribute to Anton Bruckner with his mighty setting of Christus factus est. Superbly sculpted by Ross and the Bevan singers, this is a performance that has nothing to fear in comparison with more celebrated competition, bringing out all the harmonic twists, all the textural and dynamic contrasts that are the composer’s unmistakable musical thumbprint.

That there should be so much talent in one family almost verges on the indecent, but whether for a programme to accompany you through Lent and Holy Week or simply to savour music of extraordinary variety and power, this is a thoroughly recommendable disc. An excellent recording made by engineer Mike Hatch and producer Mark Brown in the church of St Simon and Jude, Milton on Stour, is complemented by engaging booklet notes from Michael and Francis Bevan, plus full texts and translations.