At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 5. No remaining performances

In its praiseworthy campaign to replenish the choral repertory, the Vancouver Chamber Choir presented the fourth of its six 40th-anniversary commissions on Friday at the Chan Centre.

The first three, heard last season, were by Peter Berring, John Tavener, and R. Murray Schafer. The two yet to come are by Stephen Chatman and Imant Raminsh. The current one, Solitude Trilogy, was written by Tarik O’Regan, a prominent younger British composer who now lives in New York.

Only 32, O’Regan joined the VCC’s witty assistant conductor, John Trotter, in a preshow talk and spoke about the process of writing a commissioned work. He was inspired, he said, by Glenn Gould, namely his three radio documentaries of the same name, which treated spoken sound contrapuntally. Trotter was impressed that he’d heard of Gould. “You’d be surprised by how well known he is,” O’Regan said.

Solitude Trilogy is a setting of three poems, two by W.?B. Yeats and one by Edward Thomas. The VCC was joined by the Vancouver Chamber Orchestra and harpist Heidi Krutzen, and was conducted by Jon Washburn. The piece is, to put it bluntly, exquisite. The music, ultra-demanding for the singers, conveys a sense of distance and isolation and plays on the polarity of birds and human beings, that is, the distance that exists between them. The unattainability of birds is a kind of objective correlative of the piece, which uses birds to say something very touching about the human condition.

The music is beautifully written and as skillfully scored for the instruments as it is for voice. It got a standing ovation, and I was proud of the audience for appreciating something that was, on a first hearing, so difficult and yet so honestly superior. The music made me think of filaments of spider web.

Another very good piece was Raminsh’s The Great Sea, which caught the ecstatic simplicity of a poem by the early 20th-century Inuit shaman Uvavnuk, as transcribed by Greenland’s Knud Rasmussen.

The rest of the program was classical and pluralistic, combining the superb VCC singers with its spin-off groups, the Pacifica Singers and the Focus! Choir. They sang Washburn’s skillful adaptation of Gabriel Fauré’s Messe Basse, which is even more devotionally simple than his Requiem. The other two pieces divided the combined choirs into men and women.

They sang, respectively, Franz Schubert’s magically low-pitched Gesang der Geister í¼ber dem Wassern (Song of the Spirits Over the Water), based on a great poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johannes Brahms’s Four Songs, Op. 17. Both are so beautiful that had their composers written nothing else, they would have been enough to virtually define the romantic movement.