This Messiah from Sir Colin Davis does away with the symphonic forces of his two previous versions. In the accompanying DVD Davis draws attention to the difficulty of the choral writing. He wants nimble voices, he says, and the 35 professional voices of Tenebrae have those in abundance, skipping through the many ornaments in Davis’s own edition of the work and utterly secure in some now uncontroversially brisk tempi. We gain a hushed, perfectly tuned opening of “Since by man came death”, and the interjected exclamations are dramatically projected – but do we believe them? In his booklet-note, Lindsay Kemp remarks on the special impact of the chorus, not only because of the flair of Handel’s writing, “but because we as listeners cannot help but feel a more personal connection to the music when a choir is involved”. It’s the personal connection that I feel is lost from this performance (with one significant exception).

I sense that Susan Gritton and Mark Padmore would have been happier to record their parts in a more intimate studio environment. Gritton is in especially winsome, unruffled form, but her recording with Paul McCreesh more intimately attends to “How beautiful are the feet”. It is left to Sara Mingardo to bring something special and personal, which she does in all her music here, from a forthright, wonder-filled “Behold a Virgin shall conceive” to a steadily sustained account of “He was despised”, where the coolness of her delivery is warmed by the rich, vibrating intensity of her projection. She provides the most compelling of reasons to hear another Messiah.