This latest contribution to Naxos’s Penderecki series, recorded in Warsaw by Polish forces under the seasoned and always enlivening control of Antoni Wit, offers another juxtaposition of earlier (radical) with more recent (conservative) compositions. Cantata in honorem Almae Matris Universitatis Iagellonicae sescentos abhinc annos fundatae (1964) is a real curiosity. Given its – for Penderecki – unusual brevity (six and a half minutes), and its tongue-twistingly long Latin title, you might suspect a dutiful response to a welcome but uninspiring commission to mark the 600th anniversary of the Jagiellonian University’s foundation. There is indeed something almost casual about its stark, Expressionistic style, a confession perhaps that this idiom was something Penderecki no longer found congenial. What he soon came to prefer can be heard in the 50-minute Credo he wrote in 1997-98 for the Oregon Bach Festival.

The basic Latin text is filled out with other devotional material, and it seems as if the composer’s intention was to sustain a spiritual fervour that overrides even the stark contrasts – most obviously between “Crucifixus” and “Et resurrexit” – that the original verses provide, and which other composers of Credos for concert performance understandably seize on for musico-dramatic purposes. Fortunately, the initial spirit of bombastic triumphalism is modified as the work proceeds. But despite the valiant efforts of Wit and his musicians, including an excellent team of soloists, the effect is more portentous than intense, more laboured than exuberant. A more sharply focused recording might have helped, yet it is difficult to feel that any recording of Penderecki’s Credo would show it to be one of the more successful examples of his current, anti-progressive musical style.