No recording of Saul has it all, but Helmuth Rilling has a trump card in Daniel Taylor, whose honey-toned David is easily the best on disc. Each of the Canadian countertenor’s lines is eloquently thought through and beautifully sung with the perfect sense of dramatic character: “O King, your favours with delight” is fittingly modest, and the assuaging words of “O Lord whose mercies numberless” are sung with peerless vocal beauty and remarkably sensitive ornaments.

The choral singing is disciplined and there can be a pleasing richness and depth to its sound (the confidently declaimed “Envy, eldest born of hell”, for example), but the choir’s blend is stretched thinly when sopranos reach up into the higher register, and is too unwieldy in contrapuntal choruses that require better transparency and balance (“Welcome, welcome mighty King” is a mush). Bach Collegium Stuttgart plays with surprisingly lively elegance, and Rilling articulates much of the music nicely.

Such good work is undone by Rilling’s failure to realise the musical expression of more extreme passions: Saul’s “A serpent in my bosom warm’d” sounds jaunty and a shade peeved rather than irrationally psychopathic, and Merab’s “Capricious man” conveys nothing of the extremes alike in love and hate mentioned in the text. One can sense the singers desperately trying to raise the emotional stakes despite Rilling’s bland smoothness, but matters are made worse by painfully stilted recitatives (often with irritating long-delayed cadences in the continuo accompaniment). Rilling adopts the unendearing anachronism of assigning a different continuo team to each character. This is a waste of energy and also dramatically nonsensical always to accompany David’s recitatives with a harp when he is clearly not always supposed to be playing it. Handel’s score is tinkered with in several ways that undermine his careful control of dramatic orchestration: Rilling gets his flutes to double the oboes in many movements, which makes the militaristic symphonies incongruous and ridiculous.