Schnittke’s set of Psalms of Repentance (‘Verses of Repentance’ is a more accurate translation) is some of the most challenging choral music in the repertoire. Its 12 brief movements portray a spiritual journey that begins with Adam weeping outside the gates of Paradise and ends in a textless evocation of eternity.

The texts are not liturgical, so Schnittke was under no constraints in terms of the kind of music he could write, or of its technical complexity. And complex it certainly is: notes must sometimes be plucked from the air, clusters balanced against solo lines in unexpected bitonal combinations that suddenly clear into a blaze of bright tonal light. Mention is made, incidentally, of the unreliability of the Belaieff edition and the fact that Cappella Amsterdam used the original manuscript – in fact there is a new score published by Compozitor in St Petersburg in 2017, edited by Aleksey Vulfson and the present writer, which addresses the difficulties noted. This is important because it affects the actual notes in several of the movements, not to mention dynamics.

Cappella Amsterdam handle all these difficulties with panache. The singers are as at home with Schnittke’s tortured canonic writing as they are with the flashes of tonal (or modal) calm and bursts of sunlight. Tuning is impeccable, as is the pronunciation, though the recording perhaps lacks quite the sense of sonic depth of the Swedish Radio Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste. There are also recordings by the Danish National Radio Choir under Stefan Parkman (Chandos, 2/97) and the RIAS Chamber Choir under Hans-Christoph Rademann (Harmonia Mundi, 5/16), and any Schnittke enthusiast will want all four, but I would say that the choice essentially comes down to the Swedish and Dutch recordings.