Rundfunkchor Berlin

Something old, something new, something borrowed...the old saw breaks down here, since there's nothing blue on this disc. But the splendid Rundfunkchor performs old music and new, with the contemporary works borrowing liberally from the old.

The old works here are some of the finest in the repertoire, including Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium, the 40-voice motet. The overlapping lines get so dense that making out the text is both impossible and beside the point. But it is glorious. The chorus sings Henry Purcell's Hear my prayer, O Lord with appropriate tenderness, setting up two different versions of Bach's Contrapunctus I from The Art of Fugue. The first is without organ accompaniment, the second with; both are transfixing.

On the contemporary side are works by Jonathan Harvey, Sven-David Sandstrom, Antony Pitts and Knut Nystedt. Harvey's piece is based on a Gregorian chant, and he shows both a knowledge of the English choral tradition, with rapt hymnlike moments, and and up-to-date avant-garde passport. Sandstrom's work is a touching "prolongation" of the Purcell. Nystedt reworks part of Bach's Komm, susser Tod (Come, Sweet Death), changing Bach's single lines into cloudlike masses.

Pitts's XL, based on the Tallis, uses the worst compositional ideas to hit the choral repertoire in the past few decades, including having the members speak a text out of sync with each other, before it mercifully finishes. But the rest of the disc's 70 minutes, including Kodaly's 20-minute Laudes Organi, are divine.—Marc Geelhoed