Now that Tafelmusik has started up its own label, hopefully the Canadian period-instrument orchestra will return to recording new projects more prolifically. The group’s former viola player Ivars Taurins founded its associated chamber choir as long ago as 1981 but this Messiah, edited together from several live concerts in Toronto’s Koerner Hall, is the choir’s first recording of a major work. The Sinfony receives a courtly, galant treatment and as soon as the beautifully paced strings begin ‘Comfort ye’, one instantly knows that this is going to be a finely played and sensitively directed performance; Rufus Müller falls into the common trap of inviting us to ‘come for tea’ but produces a fine mesa di voce. Time and again I was impressed by exquisitely shaded string-playing, whether in the radiant ritornello of ‘Ev’ry valley’ or the relaxed gentle spirit of the Italian pastoral tradition in the Pifa and
‘He shall feed his flock’ (sung tenderly by Robin Blaze and Karina Gauvin). Blaze sings with authority and agility when ‘the refiner’s fire’ heats things up and his knack for compassionate ornamentation shines in ‘He was despised’. Hushed strings and Brett Polegato’s unaffected baritone are eloquently evocative of stillness in ‘For behold, darkness shall cover the earth’; he is less authoritative in extrovert arias, although John Thiessen’s trumpet sounds superbly. Gauvin’s emotive ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ offers some surprisingly old-fashioned beefy vibrato.

Fugal dialogues between choir sections are comfortably conversational (‘His yoke is easy’), with impeccably delicate phrasing that always corresponds to the finesse of the orchestra. The expressive intimacy of ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ might lack sheer oomph but Taurins’s sculpting of soft rhetorical gestures produces a special moment when the choir sings ‘and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all’. On a few occasions choruses stray into mannerisms, such as the sudden dynamic diminishments in ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs’ and the whispered entries in ‘He trusted in God’. Nevertheless, even if the choruses do not quite offer a consistently memorable impact, this is one of the best-played recordings of Messiah.