This new account of the Requiem bears all the hallmarks of Sir Charles Mackerras’s recent Mozart performances: strong, steady rhythms, well-defined textures, a keen sense of drama, a firm grasp of structure, and decisive but unaffected characterisation of the music. You will sense the breadth of the reading right at the start, with the strongly held choral lines, and the vitality is evident in the Kyrie, done at a lively tempo with the semiquaver runs unusually sharply etched; the whole has a powerful cumulative feeling. The ‘Dies irae’ is fast and furious, the ‘Rex tremendae’ imposing; in the ‘Confutatis’, however, I wonder if the orchestral articulation is not too nearly brutal and the loss of energy in the soft music just a little too marked. The excellent choir shines again, particularly, in the ‘Quam olim Abrahae’ fugue, done at a good lively pace, but light and athletic and dead accurate. I relished the flowing rhythms and the clarity of texture in the ‘Domine Jesu’.

Mackerras follows the Robert Levin revision. The arguments against blindly using Süssmayr are admittedly strong, but I do wonder whether every change here is truly improvement. I sympathise with the idea of enlarging and adjusting Süssmayr’s ‘Osanna’ but there is some banal music in this version, and the critical moment at the end of the Benedictus, leading back to the ‘Osanna’, really makes me shudder. And elsewhere some of the changes seem arbitrary and wilful (I deplore the loss of that searingly expressive falling sixth at ‘dona, dona eis requiem’: can anyone be sure it wasn’t Mozart’s idea?).

Still, with its admirable and tasteful solo team – I am reluctant to single anyone out, but must mention the clear, cool yet intensely expressive ring of Susan Gritton’s soprano – this must be a very strong entrant among a large, highly competitive and very distinguished field. It has a small bonus, the K546 Adagio and Fugue, not the most ingratiating of Mozart’s works but Mackerras happily doesn’t over-dramatise it or emphasise its harshness, and the performance by the excellent strings of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is as pleasing as any I have heard.