Feelings will run high on this one. Evgeni Kostitsyn’s 9/11 piece layers the Latin Requiem texts with proclamations by George Bush, Osama bin Laden, Abraham Lincoln, and Arab League secretary General Amer Moussa. A strange combination, but not without precedent: Britten cobbled together a similar allegory in his War Requiem. And there lies Kostitsyn’s main problem: the stylistic and ideological melange, along with the obvious inanity of much of the music, seems to try for the grand message; yet the polemical message is maddeningly obscured by all the gestural goings-on.

When Kostitsyn seems to ridicule both Bush and Bin Laden in American Requiem I, is he portraying the one as a simpleton and the other a madman, or presenting the whole conflict as an obscenity, something to be transcended? In ‘Islam Is Peace’, Kostitsyn sets a Bush speech on the need to respect Muslims, and backs the singer with instrumental commentary that winks and chuckles like the soundtrack to an old Burt Reynolds comedy. Or maybe a live-action Disney short on the feeding habits of muskrats. The Arab statements are given a darker, knottier context. Bin Laden quotes the Koran on the ‘large-breasted female companions’ that will greet martyrs on the other side, to dissonant and stuttering music that clashes, in music and message, with the Benedictus.

Do the inanities of Bush’s accompaniment serve to ridicule him or to emphasise his naivety? The President is a bass, which seems to underline any dark or comedic aspects of the words. Kostitsyn’s (apparent) criticisms of the US are voiced through two of its own cultural icons, Lincoln and Walt Whitman. Using the ringing tenor of Pavel Derkach, he sets Honest Abe’s prescient warning of the ‘money power’ that will inevitably rise ‘until the wealth is aggregated in few hands, and the Republic is destroyed’; according to the Noam Chomskys of this world, such power has made the US the bullying and hateful presence that it is today. Kostitsyn also includes from Whitman an admonition about loss of liberties that, read today, would seem to predict Guantanamo Bay and the US Homestead Protection Act of 1995.

Whatever the direction of his polemic, questions of style and allegiance – all the musical and political baiting – undermine any musical value the American Requiem I might have as a whole. (Kostitsyn makes such questions even more difficult by refusing to link the Latin texts with the English ones in any recognisable way.) The performance and production, musically secure as they are, don't do much to help the cause. Heavy Russian accents and some missing characters render the English texts surreal, and further weirdness comes from the elaborate overdubbing and multi-track miking of the chorus – sounding less like Britten than Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ album.