Preferences for Mozart’s ever-beguiling Requiem are now as often based on the edition used as on the performers or performance style. These two new recordings combine period instruments and Germanic pronunciation (ie “Re-kvi-em”, hard Cs and Gs) with the standard completion by Süssmayr, to which (notwithstanding its perceived technical shortcomings) can be ascribed some measure of authenticity: Süssmayr was there at the foot of the dying Mozart’s sickbed, after all.

The Australian performance by and large takes a traditional path, allowing the work to unfold naturally and without exaggeration. In the slightly wiry sound of the gut strings and the pure-toned soprano in the Introit, I was reminded to a certain extent of Hogwood’s recording with Emma Kirkby (using the Maunder edition: L’Oiseau-Lyre, 11/84R). The other soloists are fine – special mention must go to the stentorian Teddy Tahu Rhodes as he calls forth the last trumpet in the “Tuba mirum” – and they blend well. The “Rex tremendae” adopts a tempo appropriate to the King of awful majesty without going to Bernstein’s extreme (Beyer edition: DG, 10/89). Only the fugues seem somewhat dutiful and under-characterised; a continuo organ is prominent throughout. Teodor Currentzis and his Novosibirsk forces take a different tack. Blazing trumpets, explosive timpani (in the Sanctus, for example) and sudden fortes extract the maximum drama from the music and the click of bows on strings might even be overdone in fast music. While the “Rex tremendae” is taken at the jig tempo so often preferred these days, the “Confutatis” and “Hostias” are played Andante as marked, and are none the worse for it, and the Agnus Dei is slower than usual so that its quavers are equal to those of the reprise of the Introit music. The plaintive sotto voce of the upper voices and the urgent but exhausted chromatic gropings of the closing section of the “Confutatis” are most moving.

What some might not find so persuasive is the stripping-down of the opening eight bars of the “Lacrimosa” to voices and bass (these were the last notes Mozart wrote); as Süssmayr’s completion of the movement draws to a close, bells cover the transition to the exposition of the “Amen” fugue, sketched in very rough form by Mozart. (Maunder, Druce, Levin et al offer putative completions of the fugue.) It’s ear-catching and strangely effective; in the context of a much-loved sacred work, others may not be so convinced.

Both recordings realise the Requiem as a work of inward and outward drama, composed in a tumultuous time by the supreme musical dramatist of his age. For those who require a period-instrument performance that allows its drama to unfold from within the music, Walker will not disappoint. Currentzis, on the other hand, draws back the curtain on the theatre of death and mourning, of fear and consolation, in a way that is not easily forgotten.