Star rating: ****

If ever there was a gig that tried to pour a gallon of fine music into a pint-pot slot, this was it. Instead of your usual support act/main attraction line-up, there were five distinctive female "voices" all claiming our ears and sending us off to the foyer's CD stall to forage for more.

Bulgarian choir Angelite win their following with a compelling sound that spooks the imagination: 18 women, in individually vivid national costumes, creating dark chasms of yearning, twisting song that then leaps, like a hopeful skylark, or maybe skips into gossipy, chattering rhythms. Coro della Mondine di Novi from Northern Italy are gallus grandmas, mums and daughters - big of voice and full of gusto - whose rousing anthems of liberty, survival and resistance were born out of labouring in the rice fields during the Second World War. Monumental singing that couldn't be eclipsed by the enforced "modernising" of accompanying band Fiamma Fumana.

Scotland fielded Gaelic singer Mairi Smith from Lewis plus the slickly harmonising trio of Corrina Hewat, Annie Grace and Karine Polwart alongside Margaret Bennett with the Aberfeldy and District Gaelic Choir - which (whisper it) included men.