A tolling bell, a boy chorister: two sounds as ancient as the art of music itself. But in Jonathan Harvey’s 1960s classic Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco they open a portal to rich, strange new dimensions of the sonic imagination. The vocal collective SANSARA thrives in the space between ancient and modern, and in this concert in the St Martin’s Easter Festival they span centuries in sound: bringing the same vocal artistry to music by Palestrina, Harvey and Joseph Bates, and giving a rare performance of Harvey’s ravishing, ground-breaking electronic reworking of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater – music that collapse time itself, generating sounds of kaleidoscopic beauty.
