The contrast between early and recent Penderecki is extreme. This disc centres on Dies irae, one of his strongest works from the 1960s, composed for a memorial event at the Auschwitz site. It sets a miscellany of texts – not including the Latin hymn suggested by the title – in a generally fierce, expressionistic style that unsparingly depicts a season in hell. Subtlety is not called for and here, as in the earlier Psalms of David (1958), Penderecki unfurls his youthful rhetoric of protest in ways which might have been derivative but still pack a considerable punch half a century on. The dependable Antoni Wit and his assembled forces dig into the scores with relish, and even with a rather pallid acoustic the recordings convey the music’s rich colours and textural weight. Fast forward to 2005 and the Symphony No 8 is a very different proposition. These “songs of transience” to some marvellous German poetry promise an experience along the lines of Mahler’s Song of the Earth or Shostakovich’s Symphony No 14. But despite occasional passages of vocal and instrumental bravura, the effect is woefully bland – anodyne when the texts cry out for something closer to Penderecki’s earlier idiom. There are would-be grand climaxes, but they are invariably unconvincing, out of proportion, grafted on to a structure which can’t accommodate them. The soloists, especially the eloquent baritone Wojtek Drabowicz, who died in March 2007, and the orchestra’s featured bass trumpet player, do what they can, and Wit makes sure that complete stagnation is avoided: but the music remains stubbornly inert.