‘A vast and almost impossible project’, Paul McCreesh calls it in a liner note. Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts is certainly not for the faint-hearted, either in terms of its enormous scale or its spectrum of powerful, visionary expression. But McCreesh has achieved something quite out of the ordinary in this performance of the Requiem that was commissioned from Berlioz in 1837 to mark the second anniversary of the death of a general killed in an assassination attempt on the French king Louis-Philippe.

The venue for the premiere was the appropriately imposing Les Invalides in Paris. For this recording McCreesh has gone to the acoustically ideal Gothic church of St Mary Magdalene in Wrocław, the Polish city in which he is now artistic director of the annual festival Wratislavia Cantans. He has amassed the necessary forces from his Gabrieli Players and Consort, the Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir together with brass bands from Chetham’s School of Music. The impact is overwhelming, not merely in the full-throated eruptions of such episodes as the ‘Dies irae’ or the ‘Rex tremendae’. The contrapuntal intricacy of Berlioz’s choral writing is done with precision and firm accents, the haunted atmosphere of the ‘Quid sum miser’ interpreted with restrained, eloquently inflected choral singing and poignant instrumental interjections. The concept of Berlioz’s Requiem Mass may embrace a certain element of grandiosity but, listening to this performance, it is impossible to forget that Berlioz was a supreme orchestrator and a composer with a broad dramatic talent.