Leif Segerstam has become notorious in recent years for giving performances of standard repertoire that rival Celibidache in their pseudo-mystical slowness if not their refinement. So it comes as a surprise, and a pleasant one, to find him directing Beethoven with the spirit, the energy and the fine sensibility that distinguished his Sibelius series on Ondine and brings convincingly to life Beethoven’s unfulfilled ambition for Christ on the Mount of Olives as a new kind of sacred opera.

Very much against Beethoven’s wishes, the publisher removed stage directions from the score, which was published a couple of years after its hasty composition over barely more than a month early in 1803. Yet the idea that, at the conclusion of his first aria, Christ would fall to his knees is most vividly conveyed both by Jussi Myllys and Segerstam’s pointed attention to the faltering accompaniment.

In the demanding title-role, Myllys suffers little by comparison with Plácido Domingo (with Kent Nagano), who took on the role at the opposite end of his career. His baritonal reach brings grit and authority to those recitative pages of less compelling invention while a sense of slight strain in the arias fits the part as well as Florestan – and Segerstam doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to Beethoven’s defiantly personal fusion of politics, religion and music, underlining even more than Nagano how and where the oratorio anticipates key moments in the Eroica, from later the same year, and then Fidelio and Egmont.

Where Segerstam does expand to telling effect is the central duet for Christ and the Seraph, sung by Hanna-Leena Haapamäki with appealingly youthful and pure tone and assured coloratura. The orchestral and choral contributions are less polished – the tenors in particular have a rough time of it – but Segerstam keeps up the dramatic tension even through some rocky passages in the obligatory concluding fugal chorus. The Elegischer Gesang suffers from similar signs of haste or inattention: played and sung with all the inner feeling of a late-quartet slow movement, but also with too many spots of unreliable intonation and ensemble to make for an entirely consoling experience.