Composed in 1988 to celebrate the millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity, Schnittke’s Penitential Psalms overlap stylistically and conceptually with the magnificent Concerto for Chorus of three years earlier. The Psalms are based on anonymous 16th-century texts and set in a severe yet intermittently luminous style, very much in the line of Bortnyansky, Rachmaninov and other masters of the Russian sacred a cappella tradition. However, they are generally a degree or two more austere than the concerto, with fewer opportunities for ecstatic outpouring, and their demands on intonation and colouristic range are correspondingly even more intense.

The Berlin-based RIAS Chamber Choir cope admirably with all this and with the Russian texts – far more fluently, it has to be said, than do the Danish National Radio Choir in the premiere recording. Their director, Hans-Christoph Rademann, has returned to the manuscript and as a result reversed many of the editorial interventions in the published score. However, far ahead of both ensembles are the Swedish Radio Choir, whose flexibility, subtlety and sheer tonal heft are both thrilling and profoundly moving, not to mention being a good deal more atmospherically – yet by no means over-glamorously – recorded.

For anyone who can afford both discs, the three Sacred Hymns on the new issue, composed in 1983 following the repeated implorings of choral conductor Valery Polyansky, are a small but not unattractive bonus. In addition, the Harmonia Mundi booklet essay is better informed and less gushy than ECM’s. Still, it is the ECM disc that I will return to for listening pleasure.