The timing given above is no misprint. Neither has Howard Arman made a Hervé Niquet-style dash through a score stained with soft tears. So where has the rest of it gone? In fact Dvořák composed this uncommissioned, seven-movement Stabat mater in 1875 after the death of his daughter Josefa, just two days old. Having lost two more children, the now-childless 36-year-old composer returned to the score in the autumn of 1877, inserted three movements after the fourth section and orchestrated the whole work.

Bearing in mind the lengthy introductions to each movement, Dvořák may have had a full orchestral canvas in mind for the original version, but he wrote out a fully notated piano part which is beautifully modulated here by Julius Drake. Placed forwards in the mix, he brings a Schubertian lilt to the underlying rhythm of ‘Eja mater’ that no performance of the bass-heavy orchestral version can emulate. The excellent Bavarian Radio Chorus are encouraged to phrase accordingly, and the advantages of a compact, professional chorus in a work usually belonging to the choral-society tradition make themselves felt throughout.

Required by the text and the nature of its setting to pitch their contributions between ‘The Shepherd on the Rock’, Verdi’s Requiem and Dvořák’s own Moravian Duets, the soloists make a well matched team slightly let down by an unduly Italianate tenor. Best of them are Gerhild Romberger, a firm and consoling presence in the ‘Inflammatus’, and Tareq Nazmi, sensitively shading his long and rhetorical scena in ‘Fac ut ardeat’. In these respects and most others, the new recording surpasses its only rival on record, made a decade ago in a much drier acoustic by Accentus and Laurence Equilbey, with Drake’s pianism the outstanding advantage.