A glance at the current catalogue would have told Chandos that the Rachmaninov Choruses are not exactly ‘premiere recordings’, though they may well be so in their use of women’s rather than children’s chorus. The composer allowed for both options, having written the pieces for the Mariinsky Ladies’ School where he taught in his early professional years, yet having also confessed to a friend that they were beyond the capacity of any child to sing (he evidently reckoned without such highly trained groups as the Bolshoi Children’s Chorus). By this time he was already an experienced song composer, and these settings of religious and pantheistic texts by Lermontov and others are of such consistently high quality that only the language barrier can explain their neglect.

The rich tones of the Russian State Symphonic Cappella are the first I would want to hear in such a work. They also bring lustre to the choral finale of Scriabin’s First symphony. Which is just as well, because this mock-Handelian ‘Hymn to Art’, to the young Scriabin’s own enthusiastic text, is hard to take seriously. Until that point the piece is an engaging example of Russian Silver Age symphonism, and the new disc is broadly successful both as performance and recording (the solo voices in the finale are placed too far forward).

Polyansky’s trademark concern for tonal warmth and spaciousness makes him a fine choral conductor (his Chandos recording of the Schnittke Choir Concerto is one of the classics of the entire choral repertoire, for instance), but it rarely serves him so well in front of an orchestra. Fortunately Scriabin’s First places a high premium on languid characterisation, and Polyansky is more than happy to oblige. For sheer quality of playing, Muti’s Philadelphians are superior, while for raw intensity of interpretation (emphatically not for performance or recording) the historic Golovanov sweeps the board.