To Haydn’s radiant vision of prelapsarian innocence, Philippe Herreweghe brings his trademark refinement and subtlety, balancing reverence and a sense of awe (say, in the first Sunrise) with a twinkle in the eye, crucial in this of all sacred works. Rarely can a chorus have hailed the ‘new created world’ with such chirpy eagerness. Tempi are lively (perhaps a touch too pressed in the tenor’s ‘Nun schwinden’, aka ‘Now vanish before the holy beams’), rhythms supple and springy, instrumental detail delightfully telling. As on Herreweghe’s delectable Seasons recording (9/14), the wind (including the peerless Marcel Ponseele as first oboe) phrase and colour with a poetry and wit unsurpassed in any period recording. Crucially, too, the 40-strong chorus are nimble and youthful-sounding, softer-edged than, say, Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir, yet equal to the incandescent climax of ‘Die Himmel erzählen’ and nimbly negotiating their bouts of coloratura in ‘Stimmt an die Saiten’.

Of the soloists, Christina Landshamer and Maxmilian Schmitt are as persuasive as archangels as they were as peasants in The Seasons. The pellucid-toned Landshamer brings a wondering freshness and grace of ornament to both her arias, while Schmitt – fast making his name as a Mozart tenor – impresses with his lyrical elegance and veiled pianissimo singing in the first moonrise. The singer taking Raphael and Adam ideally needs a bass’s fullness and depth and a baritone’s flexibility. Though billed as a bass, Rudolf Rosen lacks an ideal basso weight, yet more than makes amends with his care for light and shade (not least in Haydn’s tender evocation of ‘the limpid brook’) and his unforced relish of the text. He evidently enjoys Haydn’s zoological extravaganza but resists the temptation to milk ‘Gewürm’. As the first couple, Rosen and Landshamer sing their love duet with a tenderness and (in the bouncy Allegro) a delighted enthusiasm I have rarely heard equalled. While it is becoming ever harder to suggest an outright winner, Herreweghe’s superbly sung and played Creation, finely recorded, easily holds its own with Gardiner, Christie, Spering and – my own narrow favourite among German-language versions – Harnoncourt.

Haydn conceived The Creation as the first bilingual oratorio, and would have been surprised at Anglophone music lovers sitting down to listen to the work in German. For obvious economic reasons, English-language recordings are still thin on the ground; and if you want a sprightly performance, on the scale of the 1808 Vienna University performance famously depicted in a wooden casket painting – a choir of some 40 singers with an orchestra of around 50 – Harry Christophers’s live Boston recording should fit the bill. The Handel and Haydn Society gave the oratorio’s US premiere in 1819. Under Christophers’s rhythmically energetic direction, its latter-day incarnation brings an infectious zest to the celebratory choruses, even if the Bostoners yield to Herreweghe’s choir in tonal refinement. Most of the tempi are virtually identical to Herreweghe’s – ie brisk – though sometimes less subtly handled. Haydn’s ethereal description of Paradise in Part 3 here sounds rather too businesslike. Conversely, Christophers exploits the acerbic potential of period instruments to evoke all the mystery and dissonant eeriness of ‘Chaos’.

Unlike his predecessor in 1819, Christophers employs three British soloists. All sing well and project the English text (the familiar quaintly mangled Milton, spruced up here and there) with immaculate clarity and point. Sarah Tynan, though occasionally gusty in coloratura, sings with bright, smiling tone and a sense of eager enjoyment in both ‘With verdure clad’ and her avian aria. She also makes a sensuous Eve. Jeremy Ovenden and Matthew Brook – more sonorously ‘bassy’ than Herreweghe’s Rudolf Rosen – are likewise vivid story-tellers and scene-painters, lacking only delicacy in their descriptions of the brook and the first woman, though the close miking of the soloists works against them here. My own choice for a Creation in English is still the performance by Paul McCreesh, the only modern recording, regardless of language, to emulate the opulent forces of the 1799 premiere. But with just a few provisos, this new Boston recording can be confidently recommended. ‘Can there be a more consistently happy work than The Creation?’ asks Christophers, rhetorically, in the booklet. In his joyous, uplifting performance he is true to his word.