Anyone who considers Wolfgang Rihm to be the 10-minute egg of hard-boiled modernism, or post-modernism, should hear this. The delicate prefiguring (on oboe) of ‘All flesh is grass’, and by extension Pascal’s defiant declaration of mankind as the thinking reed in nature, is evidence of a deep and thoroughgoing humanism in this extraordinary work. The Bavarian singers deliver the texts with a kind of numinous literalism, seeming to muse on every word, giving the whole an air that is part-ritual and part-symposium. A modern masterpiece, and (surely?) a definitive performance.

Its consistently inward mood is leavened by the burnished instrumentation (with lower woodwind and brass to the fore) and the restrained fervency of its vocal writing…The premiere is directed by Mariss Jansons with a keen sense of expressive continuity across the whole…A work which should amply repay repeated listening.