A fine-sounding, sensitively paced German Requiem with good, fairly chaste choral singing and an especially impressive baritone in Thomas E Bauer. Tempi are on the broad side, the opening ‘Selig sind’ rapt and cleanly balanced. Amazing the variety of interpretations that have extended our view of the piece in recent years, especially Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s, his swiftly lunging first bars of ‘Selig sind die Toten’ so different to Antoni Wit’s ochre-tinted reverential prayer. Gardiner also treads a nifty ‘Denn alles Fleisch’ with raw brass and battling timps setting the scene for a humbling, even terrifying first climax. Antoni Wit opts for a more magisterial, Klemperer-like approach, less warlike than Gardiner and with patiently warning horns pushing the pressure from 2'27". There’s an imposing cry of ‘Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit’ from 9'30", too, and a trenchant, rhythmically forceful reading of the more obdurate-sounding music that follows. Bauer’s singing of ‘Herr, lehre doch mich’ compares with the best and Wit’s handling of the sudden orchestral interpolation at 3'43" (premonitions of the First Symphony, already in the making) is very effective. The most tender of introductions ushers in Christiane Libor for ‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’, her approach perhaps more operatic in style than is ideal for the music (and a little unwieldy here and there), but nicely sung. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf under Klemperer still takes the palm in this movement though I’d say Katharine Fuge for Gardiner, framed by some effective string portamentos, is hardly less effective. With good sound, refined further for Blu-ray, the Naxos team has provided us with an outstanding bargain; but don’t pass up the opportunity of hearing Klemperer, Gardiner or (for a fine ‘historic’ mono option) Kempe, with Elisabeth Grümmer and Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau, a vintage classic too often passed over.