These relaxed and often sensuous performances seem conceived to support the view that Brahms’s choral style is shaped more by musical convictions than religious ones. Reading the notes of the early Op 29 Motets and the Missa canonica we may be struck by their old German counterpoint, but the members of the Swedish Radio Choir never let consonants get in the way of a singing line and their technical security is such that a moment of passing struggle for the sopranos on the exposed upper slopes of the Agnus Dei comes as a shock.

The two Op 74 Motets present a sterner face to us, to say nothing of a test to them, and Peter Dijkstra takes full opportunity of Brahms’s block-like episodes to effectively ‘stage’ ‘Warum ist das Licht gegeben’ as a painfully searching journey from Job’s despair to the consolation of the Lutheran Nunc dimittis. Even in the more straightforward companion-piece, ‘O Heiland, reiss hie Himmel auf’, Dijkstra draws out the Romantically chromatic harmonies to present Brahms’s complex attitude towards his musical heritage and his self-consciously assured place within it. Channel Classics has discreetly managed the warm ambience of a Stockholm Church to allow us within Brahms’s textures and Dijkstra ensures the often unusually low bass-lines are firmly projected.

The required strength is there in force for the homophonic and polychoral exclamations of the much later and more anachronistic Fest- und Gedenkspruche, Op 109, written for the larger forces and acoustic of Hamburg’s Cäcilienverein, but a mark of the disc is how much singing is not merely quiet but glows with a properly interior quality. Such tender attention reveals the Op 110 set as the true sacred counterpart to the late sets of piano pieces, the despair expressed in their texts placed carefully between stout Protestant humility and the bitter resignation of the Four Serious Songs, Op 121. Sung texts are printed but no translations.