Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, Orquesta de la Pasión/Maria Guinand, Robert Spano Deutsche Grammophon 477 7461 (2CDs + DVD) ***

Ten years ago the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart premiered four millennial commissions of passion settings by Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Wolfgang Rihm. Golijov’s Pasión Según San Marcos takes a Latin-American slant on St Mark, building a 90-minute work on a foundation of percussion, with ethnic choral voices and vocal solos and interludes with dance. It’s a toe-tapping, eclectic mix, as if an über-composer had taken over the kind of ideas that lay behind Fr Guido Haazen’s Missa Luba in the 1950s and Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla in the 1960s. Golijov’s work is of a different level of complexity and tonal sophistication, but the dominance of ethnic flavour is very similar. The performances (on CD under Guinand, on DVD under Spano) are excellent.

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