Telarc and Robert Spano allow us to hear the trombone in unison with, but separate from, the chorus over the opening paragraph of “Denn alles Fleisch”; when the soft rain falls in the B section of the movement, it does so moderately, a little faster and with partsong-like delicacy, just as Brahms requests, and in truth some overpointing of words in the middle movements are Spano’s only obvious deviation from the score in an interpretation that pays acute attention to the communicative traffic between singers and instruments. He can hold and then release the key-change two thirds of the way through the opening movement because his tempo gives him somewhere to go, just as the choir’s many hushed pianissimi (and excellent German) allow the big cadence points of each movement truly to blaze.

None of which could be said of Tennstedt’s Prom, yet from the first bars I knew I would be rooted to my seat. It has the indefinable desideratum of atmosphere that can settle over the usually restless Albert Hall audience when they know greatness is among them. The conductor, orchestra and choir had spent the previous week recording the Requiem for EMI, and familiarity appears to have brought with it liberation: all but one of the movements are a minute swifter in concert (alas the central “Wie lieblich” still plods, despite being taken at exactly the same speed as Spano’s free-flowing, motet-like assumption), every bar suffused with warmth and the rest for which Brahms’s texts so artfully, poignantly long. The booklet’s little biography of the conductor offers no clue why, having made the recording, Jessye Norman and Jorma Hynninen did not sing the Prom, but we can be glad Thomas Allen and Lucia Popp did. Allen in particular is in glorious voice, and fully embodies the world-weary soul-searcher of the third movement. Where does that leave us? Without disturbance to the recommendations of April’s “Collection” survey, but with two distinguished additions to its discography.