I spent 5 uninterrupted weeks in old, Christian Poland, confining myself to historic towns, cathedrals, museums and art collections, attending every single one of the live concerts offered. Compared to the delicacies offered by the visual and musical Polish inheritance, this CD is heavy handed, plodding and crushingly uniform. The 5* review by Mr. Midgley is 95% a showcase for his own historical researches, swamping us with his historical and analytic dissections of each piece while devoting about 1% of his overall discussion to the quality of the musical experience. He praises the program notes because they approach the music with the same technical and historical aridity as we find in his Amazon review. These are plodding, trudging, spirit deadening performances light years away from the quickening spirituality so obvious on every hand to visitors to historic Poland. This CD will enlist the praise of the specialist who finds it hard to locate the music in performance, but those outside this coterie will acknowledge its true status for the non-specialist ---- pleasant, plodding and very earthbound.Confirming this is easy and I recommend "Ave Maria, Praise of the Virgin Mary Through the Centuries" from Amazon 10 CDs for about £12. The first 20 seconds of any of the 10 CDs will gift you you with a brightness, alertness + bouyancy entirely missing from the plodding all-Polish programme on the CPO label and at about 10% of the price. In fact, the entire box of 10CDs over a wide historical range of praise to Mary costs gratifyingly less than the cost of the one CD under discussion here. Look it up on Amazon?