No conductor is quite so persuasive an interpreter of Cherubini as Riccardo Muti. Starting in 1980 with the best-known of the choral works, the Requiem No 1 (which Toscanini also championed), he has now recorded four of the Masses for EMI.

This Mass in F, Di Chimay, has a colourful story behind it. Cherubini, suffering from composer’s block as he approached 50, went to stay near the Castle of Chimay in France, to indulge in his serious hobbies of botany and painting. The villagers, realising they had a famous composer in their midst, approached him to write a Mass for the Feast of St Cecilia. He promptly composed the Kyrie and Gloria of what became this Mass in F.

Though that story suggests a work on a modest scale, Cherubini, with his creative block evidently evaporating, was inspired, when he returned to Paris in 1809, to write his most ambitious choral work yet. For whatever reason, it has been even more neglected than Cherubini’s other masses, but Muti conducts a lively and dramatic reading, full of life.

For Cherubini this marked a new enthusiasm for composing, and though in originality he hardly matches Haydn in his late Masses, the sweep of inspiration brings many memorable passages, such as the opening of the Gloria – here given a Toscanini-like incisiveness – the hushed contrast of ‘Qui tollis’ which follows in a devotional minor key and the trumpet-capped double fugue which rounds off the Gloria. In the ‘Et incarnatus’ he has the soprano soloist, here the radiant Ruth Ziesak, leading in the other soloists before the ‘Crucifixus’ brings rapt choral singing ornamented with broken arpeggios on pizzicato violins; ‘Et resurrexit’ has rushing semiquavers and dramatic contributions from the timpani.

Herbert Lippert is a first-rate tenor soloist, and though the bass, Ildar Abdrazakov, is not always steady with his grainy Slavonic timbre, he too is characterful. The chorus’s contribution is not always polished, but the slightly backward balance does them no favours. Overall, it is surprising that Muti waited so long before making this first recording of such a choice rarity.