The Nelson Mass is perhaps Haydn’s most popular church work. This is due in large part to the shocked awe of its stark scoring (strings with a major part for organ plus trumpets and timpani but no woodwinds), but also to the unease it communicates – an unease perhaps inspired by the darkening political situation as Napoleon swept eastwards across Europe. Not for nothing did Haydn, sensing the way the wind was blowing, give the work the title Missa in angustiis (‘Mass for troubled times’); its association with Nelson arose from the news of the admiral’s defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile and his visit to Eisenstadt in 1800, when he may have heard the Mass.

Boston Baroque join a field in which the classic period-instrument recording is perhaps that by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert (a Gramophone Award-winner in 1988). Pearlman’s smaller forces and slightly closer recording offer greater punchiness in the war-like trumpet tattoos of the Kyrie. Soprano Mary Wilson is a touch sweeter than the imperious Felicity Lott for Pinnock but the Boston basses and tenors are softer-grained when Haydn breaks into counterpoint; Pinnock’s choir seem marginally more imaginative when it comes to dispatching some of the wordier texts, such as the Credo.

Pinnock’s coupling is the wonderful Te Deum; Pearlman opts for Haydn’s antepenultimate (as numbered) symphony. The Boston musicians play here as finely as they do in the Mass’s accompaniment but – among recent recordings – Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre offer a more complete exploration of all the drama Symphony No 102 has to offer.