This cantata (though Penderecki also counts it as his Seventh Symphony) was commissioned to mark the 3000th anniversary of the city of Jerusalem; according to its Latin subtitle it was composed 'to the greater glory of God and in eternal praise of his holy city'. But I don't hear very much glory in it, I'm afraid. It is, as ever with this composer, full of striking effects (wait until you hear the 'tubaphones' - large plastic tubes slapped over their open ends with fly-swats; they sound like exceptionally agile pizzicato double-basses), and Penderecki clearly enjoys deploying the exceptional forces that the occasion justified: six soloists, three choirs and two orchestras (with four percussion groups).
It is also full of listener-friendly tonal gestures and easily graspable melodic cells; usually these are brief, quite often involving repeated notes or scale patterns. The overall mood (again, as so often with Penderecki) is frowning and strenuously gestural, though there are occasional lyrical pages, sometimes recalling the composer's compatriot Gorecki (as in the passage from Psalm 147 in the fifth movement, 'He blesses your sons and gives peace to your borders'). The music is sometimes effectively grave, but real eloquence is rare; it takes the ecstatic words of the seventh and last movement ('Arise, shine, Jerusalem, for your light has come') to draw it forth. Several of the movements are very long for their material: the fifth, with the tubaphone-dominated scherzo and the Gorecki-like lyrical phrases as its principal ideas, lasts for 16 minutes.
The two performances, as you might expect, are very similar. The main difference is that in the sixth movement, where words from the book of Ezekiel are given not to a singer but to a speaker, on the Accord disc those words are spoken in Hebrew, while for Wergo they are in Polish (the rest of the work is in Latin). Both actors are amplified; Boris Carmeli is the more entertainingly melodramatic of the two. Melodrama, indeed, is a word that often springs to mind when listening to this piece. The other singers are good, though Izabella Kyosinska sounds a bit bothered by Penderecki's demands from a soprano for both declamatory vehemence and notes well down in the alto register. Both recordings are effectively spacious.

'