This music drama, with excerpts from Sarah Dunant’s novel Sacred Hearts, read by the author and two actors, was interspersed with music that could have been sung in the fictional 16th-century Italian convent in which a strong-willed new novice is enclosed against her will.

Billed as "a gripping tale of love, lust, jealousy and political intrigue", the narration initially failed to spark. In a resonant acoustic that left me straining at times to catch the words, it was unable to capture the intimacy of the "in your head" way a novel is usually experienced. The result for me was a slight irritation as the mellifluous flow of the Gregorian chant (for which of course the acoustic was perfect) was interrupted.

But pacier and racier dialogue after the interval, as the novice attempted to escape the convent, brought the evening to life. Less frequent switching between music and narration gave Palestrina's Missa Veni Sponsa Christi room to breathe. After the excitement of the (failed) escape, there was a calm and a sense of the rigours of devotion, as the Celestial Sirens, a South-coast based women’s choir, processed as nuns through the church, creating an uneasy and almost real sense of being in the convent.