Back to the future sees a postmodern take on polychoral.

Not a dry eye in the house as a cappella legends say farewell after 40 years.

Never mind the Hallelujah chorus – there are plenty more sublime examples of the Alleluia in classical music.

Across its eight movements, this secular mass is a focused refinement of what Westlake does best.

According to Schubert’s friends, the composition of Winterreise in 1827, a year before his death, left the composer agitated and disturbed. Wilhelm Müller’s poetic journey starts with Gute Nacht, as a traveller walks away from us into a moonlit, snowy landscape. At the end of the cycle, The Signpost, he takes the path to his death. All very close to the bone for a composer with a terminal illness, and the first performance duly shocked his contemporaries. It’s good to report, then, that this superb, bold and harrowing new interpretation by the Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and English pianist Malcolm Martineau may just shock a whole new generation. There are big choices here but crucially, every moment of this intimate collaboration has been thought through. Each emotional twist and turn is presented as another step on Schubert’s solitary winter journey, from the abandoned home of his loved one to a lonely grave. Boesch may not have an idiosyncratic voice like Fischer-Dieskau or Matthias Goerne, but he certainly has an individual style and a special way with poetry. His vocal mood-swings and unprecedented use of half-tones – at times more popular songster than classical lieder singer – sets him apart from…

Jean Mouton (1459–1522) was a beneficed priest whose composing career developed slowly in provincial France until 1501, when he took a position in Grenoble. Spotted by Anne of Brittany, Mouton jumped ship to work in her chapel and subsequently that of her son-in-law Francis I. He was probably therefore in charge of the musical festivities when the latter monarch hosted Henry VIII on the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold. From these lofty heights he attracted the attention of the Medici Pope, Leo X and died a revered master and wealthy man at a respectable age. His most frequently recorded piece is the sublime Christmas antiphon, Nesciens Mater. The work has an instantly memorable main theme and an ingenious canonic structure, combining constraint with variety, to create one of the choral masterpieces of the 16th century. This disc, however, contains all of Mouton’s eight-part choral works in a veritable feast of polyphonic discoveries. The centrepiece is his Missa Tu es Petrus which demonstrates that while Mouton may be rhythmically uniform, “his melody flows in a supple thread,” as 16th-century music theorist Heinrich Glarean put it. Indeed, it is this tuneful quality that makes the program so beguiling – it’s not…