The impressive and finely balanced vocal quintent Opus Anglicanum presents its concert programme as carefully thought-put sequences of words and music. The idea is to suggest strands an audience may reflect on: music and words collide and ferment, challenging and stimulating the listener to fresh lines of enquiry.

Several of the choir`s attractive sequences – ‘The Garden’. ‘The Journey’ and ‘Bede’ - which includes Opus Anglicanum’s first substantial commission, The Necklace of Light by Judith Bingham – have been recorded and are available from their website (www.english-singers.com).

Their presentations drew strength from the measured readings by John Touhey formerly of the BBC World Service. His significant contributions – Robert Frost, Edward Thomas (‘I have come to the borders of sleep …’), the Bhagavadgita, Wilfred Owen – set the tone for Opus Anglicaum`s latest recital, given at the Michael Tippett Centre in Bath.

This lively sequence was entitled ‘Battles and Borders’, and its first half was distinctly warlike. Thus the stirring secular mediaeval tune L’homme arme and the parts of the Mass that Josquin des Pres based upon it (not the only composer of his time to make use of it) soon had the spears sharpening. The Irish writer Frank Delaney led listeners for a thoughtful stroll in the scarred countryside that the hero Cuchulain fought over; and the Calabria-based Spaniard Mateo Flecha the Elder (d. 1553) evoked snorting nostrils and pounding hooves in La Guerra, fierily sung and vividly characterised.

The basses carefully restrained themselves, and were never overbearing. Indeed, each voice presided in turn. The two most telling items in the first half were a baritone monody beautifully sung unaccompanied by the group`s leader, John Rowlands-Pritchard and evoking the fatal battle of the Douglases and the Percys at Otterburn in 1388; and a poignant newspaper extract describing how a man with metal plates in his legs was prevented from crossing the Rafah checkpoint in Gaza for treatment for fear the metal indicated a security risk. Now, as then, borders are still barriers.

A commissioned setting by Howard Skempton of the text ‘And there was war in Heaven’ was constantly imaginative. It embraced shifting drones, uneasy interplay of semitone and tones, slurs almost like quarter tones, and at one stage what sounded like Skempton`s own pared-down version of Arvo Part`s rocking tintinnabuli technique.

Latterly, an eerie two part conversation for low tenor and bass emerges. Unnervingly, the final chord simply refuses to settle, before an unexpected final resolution emerges, beautifully handled here.

Besides a lithely presented solo in the old Provencal language, there were several candidates for the remaining vocal honours: not, perhaps, the uneven hummed accompaniment to a nicely sung tenor solo setting of Gluck`s Che faro senz’Eurydice?, which made Orpheus’s tragic lament at the boundary between life and death sound like a Victorian glee; but a sad delivery of Donne’s ‘A Hymne to God the Father’ set by John Hilton; and, above all, a magical intoning by the alto Stephen Burrows, over lightly accompanying lower voices, of George Peele’s poem ‘A Farewell To Arms’, set by John Dowland. ‘His helmet now shall make a hive for honey bees And lovers’ sonnets turn’d to holy psalms …’ A vision not of war, but of an aftermath of peace and hope.