Roger Norrington is not alone in proclaiming that we habitually play Haydn’s and Mozart’s slow movements too slowly. Here, though, he makes his point with a vengeance, whipping through The Creation’s “Chaos” in a mere 3'28" where his closest recorded rival, John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv, 4/97), takes half as long again. The effect here is one of seething, swirling menace: Chaos as a cosmic snakepit. But if you want mystery, loneliness, awe, and space for Haydn’s disorienting harmonic progressions to make their full effect, then look elsewhere. Another tempo calculated to shock is the Adagio opening of the Hymn (“Von deiner Güt”) in Part 3. Haydn’s indication of two, rather than four, beats to a bar is a warning not to indulge. But Norrington manages to turn this sublime, wondering music into an almost jaunty route march.

These provocative tempo choices aside, there is much to savour on this 1990 recording disinterred from Berlin radio archives. The RIAS Chamber Choir, though rather too distantly balanced, sings with fresh, youthful tone and a palpable sense of joy; the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, founded on tight, low-calorie strings, are predictably superb, and Norrington is always eagerly responsive to the score’s drama and picturesque, poetic detail. Orchestral textures are ideally transparent, though in transferring the performance to tape the engineers have somehow managed to reverse the sound picture, with first violins on the right.

As Gabriel and Eve, Christiane Oelze, cool and silvery of tone, sings with grace and delicacy, though even her nimble coloratura technique is challenged by Norrington’s frolicsome tempo for “Nun beut die Flur”. Except for the occasional blip (“Schönheit” – beauty – is never a good word to crack on), Scot Weir uses his pleasantly rounded lyric tenor sensitively – say, in a lovely, veiled moonrise, or his tender depiction of the first woman. Peter Lika’s bass starts out promisingly, with a hushed, sepulchral “Im Anfange”. Thereafter he tends bawl and bluster like a displaced Osmin, even in the mysterious arioso “Seid fruchtbar alle” (where Norrington underlines the music’s archaic character by using solo strings, like a dusky viol consort). In the bass’s “animal” aria, “Nun scheint in vollem Glanze”, the COE’s bassoons and contrabassoon comfortably out-fart all the competition. I’m glad to have heard this. But the prime choices remain Gardiner, Harnoncourt (DHM, 5/03) and, for a version in English, on the grand scale, Paul McCreesh (Archiv, 3/08).

Peter Lika’s rough, bluff singing might seem more apt for farmer Simon in The Seasons, though even here he is far too coarse in Haydn’s profound memento mori in “Winter”. Lika apart, this 1991 performance has most of the virtues of Norrington’s Creation, with fewer drawbacks. From the splendidly trenchant overture to “Spring”, Norrington and the COE relish every detail of Haydn’s graphic orchestral tone-painting; and the choir are rather more favourably balanced than in The Creation. Norrington directs the glorious score with sympathy and humour, and brings due grandeur to the climactic choruses of praise. The boozy wine harvest is lustily uninhibited, the final vision of heaven’s gates truly exultant. Once or twice elsewhere – say, in the fugue that closes “Spring” or the autumn hunt – tempi can sound a tad cautious, especially by comparison with Gardiner (Archiv, 5/92) and, my favourite version, René Jacobs (DHM, A/04). Scot Weir does well both in his evocation of summer torpor and his aria about the wanderer lost in a blizzard. Oelze, joyously radiant in her aria in “Summer”, slyly knowing in her tale of seduction outwitted, is once more a delight, and the prime reason why I shall want to return to this recording.