‘A divine surprise’, Hervé Niquet calls this music, going on to imply that he hasn’t encountered Handel’s Coronation Anthems before. Can that really be so? He is no stranger to Handel, and nor – as the founder of the ensemble he directs here – to Baroque sacred choral music in general. Is it only in Britain that these pieces have made a mark?

Less of a surprise is that he has created a version of it very much his own, as if indeed he had never heard anyone else perform it. As with the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks he recorded in 2002 he has bumped up his forces, if not quite as much, the result this time being an orchestra of 47 and a choir of 35. That makes an unwieldy ship, and one has to congratulate Niquet on steering it as agilely as he does. But while the extra winds give off a honkingly military timbre, there is little actual gain in the body of distantly recorded sound, out of which the choral tone emerges strangely hollow and overwhelmed. The loss in definition is also regrettable: the words are hardly distinguishable, instrumental passagework is indistinct and many of the music’s edges are frustratingly blunt.

If these are irrecoverable losses, Niquet’s individual reading of the music seems just as likely to exasperate. I suspect some lovers of this music will not wish to progress far beyond hearing the choir outburst in ‘Zadok the Priest’ (actually more like ‘Zadok thee Priest’) altered to a crescendo, climaxing at ‘a-nointed’. Other quirks include extra drum rolls, almost casually abrupt endings, and swoopy slurs over the first two notes on every entry of ‘My heart is inditing’ followed by sore-thumb appoggiaturas on the fifth (‘in-di-iting’). Niquet doesn’t lack a vision – he clearly wants a flexibility of line and long-term ebb and flow familiar from his work in French sacred music, some of the tenderer passages have grace and warmth, and if you listen to that Zadok opening again you can begin to imagine a faintly mystical awe – but much of it just doesn’t feel realisable in this music.

Also here is the Dettingen Te Deum, composed to mark a military success in the War of the Austrian Succession and possibly one of Handel’s most phoned-in pieces. Niquet assigns all the solos to the choir (‘bravo’ to the basses, ‘hm’ to the altos), but although there are some nicely built climaxes (on ‘continually do cry’, for instance), the overall sound problems remain.

This really is an oddity, then, and I don’t think you have to be a stick-in-the-mud to find it easier to live with Westminster Abbey Choir and The English Concert under Simon Preston for both of these works (Archiv, 10/82, 4/84), or, for just the Anthems, the crisp precision and weight of Harry Christophers and The Sixteen (Coro, 4/09).