MUSIC / Joy of text: Tess Knighton reviews the Hilliard Ensemble at St John's Smith Square

The annual Magenta Music Christmas Festival at St John's Smith Square always offers something a little more recherche alongside repeat performances of Handel's Messiah. This year, the Hilliard Ensemble avoided the Christmas theme (except in their encore) which may be one reason why this popular group attracted a relatively low attendance. A mix of Johannes Ockeghem and Jane Macmillan might have seemed too esoteric for the less adventurous, but they missed a treat.

In recent years the Hilliard Ensemble has gained a considerable reputation as a contemporary as well as an early music group, and this concert included no fewer than five premieres of works written or arranged for the ensemble. All drew on the great strengths of this vocal quartet: absolute security of intonation, clarity of texture and fluidity of sound. Several combined related texts, exploiting the effects of polytextuality beloved of medieval composers.

Simplist in conception was Elizabeth Liddle's Whale Rant which combined a hymn for two tenors with a gloss for solo baritone, both texts drawn from Moby-Dick. The final meshing of 'Amen' and 'Goodnight' was particularly effective. In River and Shadow Piers Hellawell juxtaposed poems by Donne and Apollinaire in a piece that seemed primarily concerned with richness of harmonies and which complemented well Messiaen's La Nativite du Seigneur heard earlier in the evening in an immediate and powerful performance by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.

However, it was James Macmillan's . . .here in hiding. . . that afforded the most startling link with the compositional processes of Ockeghem and his contemporaries. This is a multi-sectional work based on contrasted vocal scorings and textures, polytextuality (here Aquinas's hymn 'Adoro te devote' and Gerard Manley Hopkins's inspired translation of it), a carefully controlled dissonance treatment and passages constructed around borrowed melodies. It explored all the possibilities of a four-voice texture and was given a superbly shaped performance by the Hilliard Ensemble. So, too, was the haiku-inspired Aki no ko-e by Jackson Hill in which the voices swooped and slided around sustained pitches like swallows in play.

Strung between these was some plainchants, to cleanse the palate, together with the five movements of Ockeghem's extraordinary Missa Prolationum by way of a further challenge. A work of mind-boggling technical ingenuity, it nevertheless sounds fluid and naturally harmonious. The Hilliard Ensemble pushed the wordy movements (Gloria and Credo), but allowed the delicate duet textures to unfurl unhurriedly in the others. The pitch adopted in performance took David James into the countertenor stratosphere, but as a whole it was persuasively pliant. This was an exciting and imaginative programme performed superbly well.