Two concerts in Liverpool in autumn 2016 celebrated the sixtieth birthday year of James Wishart, the composer, pianist, conductor, writer and concert promoter who has been a major figure in musical life in the north west of England for nearly four decades. His music reflects his wide cultural and social interests and these concerts showcased three compositions that were witty, emotionally searing and sonically daring.

The easiest part of running a new music group in Britain is probably the beginning. You gather some like-minded musicians, make a programme, find a venue and perform. After that it gets harder: establishing a reputation, persuading someone to fund you, negotiating with promoters, maintaining the commitment of your musicians, keeping going year after year. But EXAUDI have done much more than just keep going: they have established new standards for what an ensemble of solo voices can achieve and championed a host of spectacularly ambitious, beautiful, challenging works, both their own commissions and revivals of music waiting for a group of this quality to come along. Their fifteenth birthday is, then, something to celebrate, and the Wigmore Hall an ideal venue in which to celebrate a consort of beautifully blended voices.

As the audience's rustling quietens along with the memories of everyday pulses, ethereal sounds appear. We are at Helsinki's iconic Rock Church, on the eighth night of the biennial Musica nova festival for contemporary music. The Helsinki Chamber Choir sound the first, lingering lines of György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna from the balcony, behind the audience. The peculiar acoustics give the illusion that the choir is hidden in between the crevasses and cracks of the stone wall in front. The listener is surrounded. Marvellously kept together by Nils Schweckendiek, the singers transform the colour of their voices into sine-tones and oboes in a strangely soothing way. This rendition now somewhat more present than the night before, when the choir echoed the same micropolyphonic lines across the aula of the Kiasma art museum. There the cool distance of the work really spoke in a mesmerising way, with an unreachable caress.