At Christ Church Cathedral on Thursday, October 13. Continues October 16 at St. Philip’s Anglican Church

There’s something elegantly symmetrical about musica intima: 12 singers, 12 letters, all lower case. Who knows how they ever got the idea of singing without a conductor, something comparable to being an aerialist without a net but no doubt based in a tradition as ancient as singing itself? The wonder is that they do it so well, taking their cues from a breath, a glance, some subtle little thing going on among them and unseen by the audience—because to notice it would be to break the spell. It would be easy to play on this, to hoke it up, but they don’t.

Another wonder is that the Lower Mainland of B.C. should be so disproportionately rich in excellent choirs, and musica intima is at the top of the list. They give a lot of attention to their concerts, which are themed, as was Thursday’s at Christ Church Cathedral. The concert, called Into the Wild, was devoted to the seasons, autumn standing out as an emotionally loaded time with its encroaching cold and waning light, something quite perceptible in the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s Autumn Landscapes. This piece, in five short sections, is not a programmatic work of pretty description—it seems to proceed from weather itself: it’s “elemental”.

Vancouver composer Leslie Uyeda’s A Summer’s Singing reduced the choir to eight voices and its difficult chords were all the more difficult for being so exposed, but the singers held onto them superbly.

The American Eric Whitacre deserves his status as one of the preeminent choral composers writing today, and the ineffably calm, sensuous Water Night is one his finest pieces that I have heard, with his signature of unusual chords and progressions. Ditto for R. Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs. This major Canadian composer can come off as flaky, but even at his most extreme, you sense that his work comes from a very sane place. Certainly this native Indian-inflected series of chants does: chants to bring back the wolf, for clear water, to keep bees warm in winter, and to make the magic work. You may have struggled to fight back tears.

This was also the case for the American composer Gwyneth Walker’s God’s Grandeur, which was sung with great conviction and purity.

The only piece on the program that felt out-of-place, not to say pointless and much too long on top of it, was Stephen Hatfield’s Our Lady of the Snows, a quasi-mass that bogs down in pointless faux-archaism.

But when a concert hits as many high points as this one did, it’s something to be celebrated. Like the program, this is a choir for all seasons.