There is a neat correspondence in the way the earliest and most recent pieces included here – Stabat mater (1962) and Benedictus (1992) – both move to resolutions on simple major triads. So far, so consistent: the difference is in the extent to which the triads in later work govern the musical fabric throughout. In the 1960s such common chords had to be fought for, and could even seem tacked on rather arbitrarily; an effect without a sufficient cause.
In general, however, it is another kind of consistency that makes this disc musically worthwhile. Although all the works tend to be reflective and devotional in character, the contrapuntal medium of the unaccompanied chorus inspires the composer to an economical intensity all too often absent from his later instrumental works. Indeed, it is as part of that intensity that elements of his early, much more dissonant style, so powerfully represented in the three extracts from the St Luke Passion and the fragment from the Magnificat, re-emerge within the more traditional harmonic world of the later pieces – especially the Veni creator. Yet it should also be said that Penderecki’s austere response to this celebratory text seems more than a little strange. Of the later works I find Song of Cherubim the most powerful, ending as it does with remarkably rapt “Alleluias”. A note tells us that the composer regards the Benedictus as a draft to be reworked at a later stage.
These performances are on the whole models of pure-toned clarity, although the sound of the Tapiola Chamber Choir can harden into harshness at higher dynamic levels. The recordings, made in the Olari Church, Espoo, Finland, are full of atmosphere but well-balanced and not excessively resonant.'