Good choral singing in the true blue British tradition is hard to find south of Dover.

We Maltese are not natural songsters like the Welsh for instance with whom we are often muddled up with because of a similarity in singsong accents.

I was once totally fooled when on a train to Gloucester the ticket collector asked me for my ticket in what I thought was an unmistakable Maltese accent.” You’reMaltese,” said I. “No” he replied, “I’m Welsh!”

Nevertheless because of our inherent British tradition our finest choirs have traditionally always been those with a strong element of British singing in the style of that non plus ultra of choirs, Kings College Cambridge.

The New Choral Singers directed by Robert Calleja have this quintessentially British attitude to choral singing which I like immensely and which, with every performance, goes from strength to strength.

I thoroughly enjoyed the performance held in the lovely austere baroque St Dominic’s church in Rabat on June 3.

With a mixture of the overtly popular, the sublimely superb and a couple of curiosities thrown in for good measure the evening was as eclectically pleasing as one would wish.

Whatever was sung though was sung with great precision and accuracy and one was left with a warm feeling of both physical and mental satisfaction for the marriage of aesthetic richness and austere spirituality was balanced perfectly.

I will discuss two works in particular, the ethereal Totus Tuus by Henryk Gorecki and the Praeces Sancti Stephani by our own Alexander Vella Gregory.

The atmosphere of the Gorecki piece with its mantra like sequences is one of intense Catholic and Marian faith which as a Maltese I could not fail to be very moved by. Its form is grandiosely expansive in scope and its colours are like rich velvets and satins dappled by passages of golden sunlight.

The choir interpreted this lovely work with fervour tempered by a great attention to nuance and detail although I found the not so subtle tuning two thirds in the work a trifle disconcerting but quickly discounted it because the overall effect was stunning.

The Vella Gregory Praeces was entirely different. Here there is no earthly connection. It is as if we are visualising the stoning of Christianity’s first official martyr but we are already with the saint in a different time frame peopled by saints, patriarchs and angels being received into heaven. The barbarous blood and gore and the piling of jagged stones over a still twitching body is there but silent as if in an early movie. The saint’s soul is already transfigured with divinity.

I could not help thinking of my favourite painting of Saint Stephen which is in our national collection at the Fine Arts Museum in Valletta.

The dark and brooding Jusepe Ribera painting of St Stephen holding the instruments of his martyrdom and wearing a dalmatic of the finest light maroon silk trimmed with an embroidered pattern that is almost chinoiserie was amply illustrated by the gently shifting sections rising in an inexorable circular rhythm to a powerful crescendo putting us, along with the saint, on a plane that was undeniably divine.

The Bartolucci Ave Maria sung by mezzo Alexandra Scicluna is scored more for contralto than for mezzo with these deep and creamy melodic lines that Scicluna tackled with ease.

The mezzo is a very versatile voice with a large and all encompassing range and the pitch this time around was more reminiscent of Azucena’s Stride La Vampa than one of Mahler’s Ruckertlieder or Strauss’s songs.

A very satisfying performance all round.