James MacMillan's relationship with Cappella Nova and director Alan Tavener stretches back two decades to 1987 when the group gave the first Scottish performance of the psalm-setting Beatus Vir. The latest fruit of this association is a commission for three works for Cappella Nova's annual pre-Easter performances.

The new works are eight-voice settings of three of the Responsories from the Tenebrae Office, a service that inspired some of the greatest of the Renaissance composers. MacMillan's music acknowledges this historical precedent, a reference made clear by the stylistic links between passages in his pieces and the works by Renaissance masters such as Lassus, Morales and Palestrina which preceded them in the first half of Cappella Nova's Holy Week sequence. Elsewhere, MacMillan's music alludes to a more recent liturgical music tradition, in chromatic writing reminiscent of Poulenc's Penitential Motets.

MacMillan intends the works to be performed as a single unit, though for the premiere Cappella Nova interspersed them with passages of Gregorian chant, sung by the Scottish Plainsong Choir. As a result, it was difficult to discern what appears to be structural and musical links between the three works. On first hearing the third setting, Jesum Tradidit is the most memorable; the opening cry of "Jesum" interjecting into solo passages reminiscent of an ancient Jewish cantor. Here as elsewhere, MacMillan's dissonant, note-on-note writing needs razor-sharp tuning; something it didn't always receive in Cappella Nova's performances.