As anyone who knows his Mozart opera recordings, or indeed his invigorating Die Jahreszeiten (A/04), might guess, René Jacobs conducts an exuberant, colourful, sometimes controversial Creation. Controversy, as usual, comes mainly from the fortepiano continuo, creative, witty or irritating, according to taste and mood. The ornamental flourishes, mini-fantasias and teasing touches of timing can be fun, as in the delightful evocation of the angels’ immortal harps. But some things jar: say, the tinkling, mandolin-like arpeggios in the pastoral music describing the grazing cattle (shades here of Don Giovanni’s serenade), or the manic toccata – evidently suggesting the Fall – that tumbles in on the end of the Adam and Eve duet. And why, I wonder, does the continuo crash in so tactlessly after the bass’s “animal” aria, “Nun scheint in vollem Glanze”? Such facetious touches worked brilliantly in Jacobs’s Gramophone Award-winning Figaro recording. Here they can seem merely meretricious.

Continuo frolics aside, Jacobs occasionally makes eccentric tempo choices, at both ends of the spectrum, most unnervingly in the helter-skelter speed adopted for “Rollend in schäumenden Wellen”. Johannes Weisser copes gamely in the resultant tsunami, but the otherwise lithe, poised Freiburg strings can only cling on frantically. Elsewhere Weisser and the orchestra gleefully relish Haydn’s zoological extravaganza (though the bottom D on “Gewürm” is perhaps a plunge too far for his pleasing lyric baritone); and he combines sensitively with Julia Kleiter’s radiant, sensuous Eve in Part 3. The first couple sound properly eager and amorous in their contredanse duet, given an infectious bounce by Jacobs. Kleiter – to my mind preferable to both Dorothea Röschmann for Harnoncourt and Gardiner’s coy Sylvia NcNair – is no less beguiling in “Nun beut die Flur”, here a happy, wondering song to the first spring enhanced by spontaneous-sounding ornamentation. Maximilian Schmitt, with his firm, finely focused tone and elegant phrasing, is excellent too, whether putting hell’s spirits to flight, evoking the first moonrise or tenderly hymning the creation of Eve.

From their awed pianissimo first entry as the spirit of God moves across the face of the waters, the RIAS Chamber Choir are unfailingly responsive, singing with fresh, well-knit tone, and real élan in the big celebratory choruses. “Die Himmel erzählen” (aka “The Heavens are telling”), is properly a highlight, the pacing perfectly judged (Gardiner, in his often thrilling recording, is arguably a shade driven here, Harnoncourt slightly over-deliberate), the overwhelming final climax finely prepared and clinched. Here and elsewhere Jacobs encourages plenty of light and shade in the singing without the results sounding over-artful – fatal in this particular work. The hyperactive continuo will remain a problem for some. But for exhilaration, graphic characterisation, not least from the delicious period woodwind, and a Haydnesque sense of joy, this superbly recorded new Creation (the choral/instrumental balance perfectly judged) is at least a match for the fine, comparably scaled period-instrument performances from Gardiner and Harnoncourt.