The St Luke Passion is an obvious candidate for the Naxos Penderecki series, and I was particularly interested to hear how the ever-resourceful Antoni Wit would handle it. As I suggested in connection with the Dabringhaus and Grimm recording under Marc Soustrot, the piece has worn rather less well than that other major choral composition of the 1960s, Britten’s War Requiem, with its more obvious ambiguities and secular resonances: and the intense, economical treatment of the Passion story found in Arvo Pärt’s Passio, and other examples of so-called ‘holy minimalism’, now seem rather more compelling as settings of sacred texts than Penderecki’s alternations of drifting understatement and rather blatant bombast.

Wit has chosen to stress the contrasts between these different modes of expression, and his expansive reading is closer in spirit as well as timing to the composer’s own version than to the more tautly projected Soustrot. Wit’s reading, like Penderecki’s, tends to draw attention to the music’s lack of melodic flow, and its reliance on a narrow repertory of technical devices of the kind which seemed much more original and effective in 1967 than they do today. It’s the relatively brief moments of almost expressionistic drama (especially those surrounding the death of Christ) which come off best, aided by a pungently immediate recording, complete with rasping organ and blazing brass. (The recording was not made in a cathedral but in Warsaw’s Philharmonic Hall.)

The soloists are all excellent – a pity that they don’t have more to do – and the large chorus copes well, if not always with ideal spontaneity. Given the importance of the spoken narration, the absence of text and translation is particularly unfortunate, though Richard Whitehouse’s track-cued synopsis is certainly better than nothing.