Mixed blessings from this latest attempt to represent Berlioz’s ‘Great Mass’ effectively on disc. Pappano – who brought ‘his’ choir with him from Rome for this 2019 Gastspiel in Amsterdam – is (no closet criticism intended) not exactly a Berlioz habitué. But his wide-ranging Covent Garden repertoire has bred in him an often compelling interpreter of large-scale vocal works with orchestra. Here he is especially attentive to the score’s many pauses, playing them like cat and mouse – as I think Berlioz intended – in often make-you-jump contrast to the loudest instrumental entries in the work’s closing movements. Is the reading too Latin overall? No matter: Pappano has always seemed a lyricist rather than a brutalist, the Concertgebouw go with him all the way and there is some beautiful and virtuoso playing, and an involved (and decidedly Latin) contribution from the tenor in the Sanctus.

The choir’s work and the ideal geography of Berlioz’s instrumental layout raise some questions. Maybe we’re too used here to a more northern (English, American or German) attack on the familiar text, and are always hankering for a little of the sheer violence of Verdi’s setting of the Mass. The softer lyricism of the Santa Cecilia singers occasionally seems to call for clearer enunciation, yet the hall’s acoustic is famously good. And tuning is not always as needlepoint accurate as it might be after two performances and presumably rehearsals from which to record.

The listener might find also the aural layout here of Berlioz’s four extra brass orchestras constricting. Whatever microphone wizardry is applied to them, the Concertgebouw’s upper galleries and slips – there are photos in the set’s handsome booklet – simply do not have the distance and space from the main body of the orchestra and choir that were available to the composer’s literally wide-reaching plan for his Paris Les Invalides premiere. The basic sound quality is always fine in itself but the offstages appear from a well-balanced next door rather than ethereal space.

The Nelson (Erato, 10/19), the Munch (DG, 10/68), either Colin Davis (Philips, 9/70; LSO Live, 6/13) and one of the live German Mitropouloses from the 1950s (ICA Classics, 11/12; Orfeo) can be less tight and pinpoint accurate than this newcomer but in their bigger-sounding spaces are more accommodating of Berlioz’s wild visions. The composer’s often eccentrically imaginative handling of the Latin text – beginning the ‘Dies irae’ at such a quiet dynamic is just the start – demand nothing less.