Shortly before he died in 1868, Rossini orchestrated his last substantial masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle, not because it required orchestration but to stop chancers and go-getters doing so after his death. The original scoring for 12 voices, two pianos and harmonium is so distinctive and so apt to the work’s courtly, gamesome and yet at the same time angst-ridden character that one wonders why anyone would wish to undertake the far-from-easy task of performing it with more substantial choral forces than Rossini originally intended.

That said, it is a work to which choral societies have been increasingly drawn in recent years. Riccardo Chailly first pointed the way in 1993 with a superb CD recording with the Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale, Bologna (Decca, 2/95), and this live performance filmed in the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 2008 is if anything even finer. The combined choirs of the Gewandhaus and the Leipzig Opera sing like chamber musicians in a stylish, spruce and beautifully scaled performance – the kind Mendelssohn might have conducted had he lived to hear his admired friend’s valedictory masterpiece.

Chailly has two dark-toned soloists on the distaff side, nicely matched with a mobile bass and quick-eyed tenor. If there is a reservation to be entered it concerns the soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska, whose somewhat restless singing, and the equally restless camerawork it seems to inspire, doesn’t always sit well in the larger context. The pivotal “Crucifixus” is none too well projected. The Agnus Dei of the ever-reliable Manuela Custer is, by contrast, superb.

Rossini’s orchestration, itself not without interest as a period phenomenon, is realised with tact and imagination by Chailly and his Gewandhaus players, and organist Michael Schönheit gives a magisterial account of the transitional “Prélude religieux”, which emerges here as the kind of large-scale organ improvisation Rossini might well have expected it to be in the altered context.