In his 1968 essay ‘Choral Music and False Consciousness’, Theodor Adorno declared that ‘the conviviality of the choir engenders an artificial warmth’. He was essentially pressing the point that choral music not, as he put it, ‘worked out with full compositional force’ conveyed ‘something illusory’ within its fabric, as in the tendency of (some) composers to get off on a sentimental attachment to the worthiness of the choral tradition, an idea which ought to blare out from the front of all Eric Whitacre and John Tavener CDs like the health warning on a packet of fags.

To be honest, I doubt whether Adorno would have liked Alfred Schnittke’s Zwölf Bussverse (‘12 Penitential Psalms’) much either, but hearing Schnittke grapple with the aesthetic problems he identifies, then fixing them through his smart compositional nous and the alertness of his aural imagination, is a reminder of why philosophers are great but (some) composers are better. Written in 1988 to mark the thousand-year anniversary of Russia’s Christianisation, Schnittke achieves a whole lot more than a mere reheat of the Russian Orthodox and Gregorian chant traditions; he occupies this music, infiltrating its sound world with concepts of line, harmony, scale and structure clearly imported from his concert music.

And so the authentic model is overlaid with the sound of its own historical resonance. Schnittke plundered an anthology of 16th-century Russian writings for text and from the get-go his freefall chromatic tumble forces open space between ‘then’ and ‘now’. The SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart’s animated cry stresses the unsettled and exploratory disposition of Schnittke’s harmony; there’s nothing ‘illusionary’ here. As the third piece meditates upon ‘God’s wrath’, it collapses inside a slagheap of clustered, distended triads – again the chiselled lucidity of the performance heightening the impact. The sixth piece catches up with the future with a polyphony of polyphonies, Schnittke’s freely woven counterpoint pointedly placed after the fifth setting’s tonal affirmation. The final psalm, like the pairing, Stimmen der Natur, stretches glacially evolving harmonies over a grand scale – full compositional force, full steam ahead.