In his lifetime Haydn was frequently taken to task for the worldliness of his Masses – too much of the ballroom and the opera house, not enough of sobriety and penitential gloom. But they seem positively Cistercian in their restraint alongside the C minor Mass of the Italianised German Simon Mayr, first performed in the Abbey of Einsiedeln, Switzerland, in 1826.

Mayr’s Kyrie, overtly based on the opening theme of Beethoven’s C minor Piano Trio, Op 1 No 3, has an imposing gravitas. Thereafter much of the Mass, with its jaunty march rhythms and tootling woodwind solos, sounds like opera buffa by other means – typical of Italian sacred music of the day. Rapidly losing his sight in the mid-1820s, Mayr filched movements by his star pupil Donizetti for large chunks of the Credo. Never can the Resurrection have provoked such unbridled jollity as here. Yet amid the rather facile theatricality – Donizetti’s and Mayr’s own – are moments of real imagination and power: say, in the dramatic choral interjections of the ‘Qui tollis’, or the ‘Crucifixus’, with its tortuous violin obbligato and ominous hushed trumpets. And if Mayr’s mellifluous setting of the ‘Agnus Dei’ is neither shadowed nor supplicatory, it is enlivened by a florid clarinet solo that could have strayed out of a Weber Clarinet Concerto.

The Stabat mater from some 20 years earlier is a similarly mixed bag. Gently expressive numbers, often with a nod to Pergolesi’s famous setting, rub shoulders with movements that seem almost indecently cheerful, even by the Italian standards of the time. The fervent plea to the Virgin in ‘Eia mater’ here becomes a cue for a frolic around the Cross, courtesy of a skittering duet for soprano and solo violin. Despite moments of flatness, Katja Stuber sings this with grace and spirit. Of the other soloists, Tareq Nazmi impresses with his dark, hieratic bass, while Fernando Guimarães sings his ‘Stabat mater’ solo with attractive lyrical tone and shapely phrasing, and combines eloquently with Stuber in the Mass’s ‘Qui tollis’. Under Florian Helgath’s vigorous direction the chorus sound disciplined and full-bodied, though they are not best served by the cavernous church resonance. A prime pleasure in works that blur the sacred and the secular is the playing of Concerto Köln, whether en bloc or in the instrumental solos that so often redeem Mayr’s invention from blandness.