Stewart French (guitar), National Chamber Choir/ Paul Hillier Harmonia Mundi, HMU 807486 ***

Londoner Tarik O'Regan's Acallam na Senórach: an Irish Colloquy,written for the National Chamber Choir and premiered in Dublin last November, here makes an early appearance on CD. It's a setting of parts of a 12th-century text that tells of the interactions between Caílte, Oisín and St Patrick. O'Regan's 62-minute work is in a slow-moving, pared-back style, mock-ancient you might say, but not ethnically specific. It's almost ritualistically purposeful in its concentration on narrative, as it shifts between monodic delivery and a range of soft choral dissonances. The guitar is used not just as an accompaniment but also has interludes to represent the playing of the musician Cas Corach. The performance under Paul Hillier is first-rate, but the music itself has a kind of new- age blandness, and never really gets out of first gear. See url.ie/55ay