Now, it’s not that we’re totally averse to new music in the London Symphony Chorus. Still, mention a composer many of us don’t know and a piece of music we’ve barely even heard of and we can be a little cautious.

Indeed, oftentimes, there’s a familiar pattern to our approach – we start by anticipating the worst, we wrestle with the music in our early rehearsals, finding it hard we declare the music to be absolute rubbish, until finally we put a (more or less) successful performance ‘in the bag’ and suddenly we’re converted.

So, on Wednesday evening, members of the London Symphony Chorus arrived for their first rehearsal of Schnittke’s Nagasaki with a familiar wariness. Half way through our first rehearsal we are already saying the music is not as bad as we had expected. By the end of our second rehearsal we are defying our usual pattern and engaging fully with the music’s haunting sounds and vital rhythms – not to mention the Russian text.

The BBC proms site (at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2009/whatson/2408.shtml#prom52) describes Schnittke’s early, Orff-influenced oratorio, an agonised expression of solidarity with the victims of the second atomic bomb, dropped on the city of Nagasaki the day before Japan’s surrender.

Heavily criticised by the Soviet Composers’ Union, it only received its 1959 broadcast premiere (on Moscow World Service Radio) after Shostakovich’s recommendation, and was not publicly performed until 2006.

As we prepare to perform this piece, I feel privileged to be able to join the Chorus for its belated UK premiere.

Do come and join us.