Schnittke's Choir Concerto is the major work here… As a stunning kind of evocation of all the Russian Orthodox church music one has ever heard, and yet masterfully composed with a powerful sense of architecture and inner logic, it's surely up there with Rachmaninov's Vespers. There is already an excellent recent version from the Holst Singers under Stephen Layton on Hyperion... But this new BIS version, it is has more recorded resonance, also exudes greater warmth - it's a refulgently passionate performance in which the Concerto emerges as simultaneously more ardent and more monumental, despite Tõnu Kalijuste's relatively faster tempi.