This is a Russian choral album with a difference, offering not only the rich, diatonic panoply of Glinka’s cherubim and Tchaikovsky’s seraphim, but also expressions of dissidence and dissonance from Gubaidulina and Tsvetayeva. The opening surprise is that Schnittke’s Three Hymns of 1984 belong more to the former than the latter aesthetic. Philip Clark reckoned them ‘pleasant but slight sketches’ (2/14) – but he was listening to the plusher sound and more rounded edges of the Bavarian Radio Choir. These are simple, chordal settings, gently shaded with the open sixths and suspended dissonance more characteristic of Lauridsen and Nystedt than the composer of the Penitential Psalms previously recorded by these forces (6/12).

If you’ve heard that disc, you won’t expect the SWR Vokalensemble to shroud Rachmaninov in clouds of vibrato, but they show that he doesn’t need it. Precision and clarity can be taken for granted with them as it can with the Bavarian and Swedish Radio choirs, for example, but what sets these recordings apart is the direct engagement with and forward projection of the text. Sung by the Netherlands Chamber Choir on Globe, Taneyev’s 12 settings of Yakov Polonsky are lush and almost indigestibly rich, a Russian counterpart to Strauss’s Deutsche Motette. The last three are the most harmonically overloaded music on the new disc but Creed shapes Polonsky’s overheated nature imagery as sympathetically as he does Tsvetayeva’s text from a century and a world away. The booklet includes helpful introductions by Dorothea Redepenning and sung texts and translations in Cyrillic Russian, German and English.