Polyphony is a high-class act, and the Temple Church recordings are impressive, just as they were for the group’s recent Tavener disc. Dynamics are beautifully differentiated, particularly below forte. The choice of recent repertoire and the carefully tiered sound make this a self-recommending SACD issue for Pärt collectors (the CD version picked up a Gramophone choral award, too) but comparisons are very interesting.

. . . which was the son of . . . is a Baroque/Classical hybrid setting of Christ’s genealogy. Layton’s direction has just a shade less confidence and flexibility than the Estonian Philharmonic Choir with Paul Hillier on a Harmonia Mundi “Estonian Voices” SACD. Polyphony enunciates the English words like the natives they are, but otherwise Hillier and the Estonians dig deeper and find more character and warmth in what could have seemed a very bald project, setting a dull text. Polyphony is not dull, it just tends to choose a slow, patient approach, and there is another way with Pärt in most of these works. Also interestingly, Stephen Wallace on Black Box (28:2) seems at first to find more austere feelings (if not more spellbinding purity) than the dedicatee David James in Pärt’s Burns setting, My heart’s in the Highlands, another composition from 2000. The Hyperion account is much slower, but it grows in stature as it proceeds. James has just one note to sing in each verse: three slow, monotone chants, spelling out a triad (F Minor) as well as the words, which Pärt has known since childhood. The organ accompaniment is sparse, and music doesn’t come much more minimal, but the work goes straight from the heart to the heart. I wouldn’t be without Wallace, but James explores these single notes like an expert astronomer, training a telescope on distant clusters of stars and galaxies, finding awesome color and detail in what seemed to be flat white dots.

Salve Regina from 2002 is a 12-minute setting. It opens with the utmost reverence but heads for an ecstatic climax about eight-minutes in. Layton has the drama down pat, and all the other varied pieces go well, especially Nunc dimittis, though Dopo la vittoria could use an extra notch of sprightliness. Triodion, the longest work here, celebrates the 150th anniversary of the same Sussex school (Lancing College) whose centenary was marked by Britten’s St. Nicolas in 1948. One of the hardest acts to follow, but Polyphony is a class act, as I said, and they have the keys to this unearthly kingdom. Quiet? I should say so. Sounds flicker around like the music of those heavenly bodies on a cold night at the observatory. “The busy world is hushed” says Cardinal Newman, in the Littlemore Tractus. Hush is the word. Hush and awe, not shock and awe, being the message here, in tragic times. The Hillier discs are essential, as is the Black Box CD (especially for the Pärt-allergic), but this Polyphony recital has been carefully thought-out, and deserves the accolades, notably for the quiet singing and the engulfing, resonant sound. Notes are excellent, and the experience would probably, for 78 minutes, make a believer of an asteroid.

Paul Ingram, FANFARE