Chandos released an impressive disc of The Canticle of the Sun by the Danish National Choir with David Geringas earlier this year (2/04). This performance is even better. Sofia Gubaidulina intended her setting of St Francis’s text to be a celebration of what, for her, are two important sources of spiritual light: Rostropovich (the dedicatee, whose recording is still available on EMI, 9/01) and the accessibility, after the collapse of the USSR, of diverse religious sources across the former Soviet empire.

Her background includes Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish elements, and The Canticle evokes the interaction and inter-dependency of the traditional four elements as well as the sun, moon, life and death. In depicting these, Gubaidulina makes remarkable demands on the soloist: in one passage the cello’s C-string has to be tuned down between phrases, then a stick is substituted for the bow before the soloist abandons the cello altogether to prompt responses from the choir with a flexatone played with a double-bass bow. None of this sounds gimmicky or alienating. Instead, it creates a sometimes unsettling but always involving ritual.

Pieter Wispelwey’s stylistic range is considerable, from two very convincing recordings of the Bach suites onwards. His individuality makes him an ideal soloist on the rather eerie Canticle, and it is this and the immediacy of his playing which makes his performances of the brief Preludes as gripping as his Bach interpretations. On In Croce, the most leftfield of the pieces here, cello and bayan (Russian accordion) approach each other from remote registers, provoking explosions of sound when their lines cross. A suitably intense climax to a powerful disc.