This is as expertly shaped and directed a performance of Rossini’s Stabat mater as you could wish to hear. Indeed, had the singing on the distaff side of the solo quartet been on the same level of accomplishment as that of the tenor and the bass, it might have been possible to argue that this was as good a version as any we have had on record. Yet even with a soprano more engaged and less out of sorts vocally than Barbara Frittoli appears to be in the ‘Quis est homo’ and ‘Inflammatus’, this is not a version I would be taking from the shelves at Easter.

It is not that the performance lacks spark. There are times in Chailly’s performance when his combination of fine detailing and brisk tempi – as brisk as on Kertész’s well-cast but ill-conducted 1971 Decca set – had me speculating what it might have been like to hear Toscanini in this work. The snag is, it is all a bit too brisk and efficient. This is not the place to go into the complexities of the original poem or the complexities – psychological as well as musical – of Rossini’s setting of it. Suffice it to say, so essentially secular a performance does the work few favours.

So which version should one take down on Good Friday or Easter Saturday? The most intense one I know is a widely ignored 1999 reissue on Preiser of a 1949 Salzburg Festival performance under the 56-year-old Director of Cathedral Music in Salzburg, Joseph Messner. Hearing the young Irmgard Seefried and the veteran Rosette Anday in ‘Quis est homo’ is to experience music-making of a high state of technical preparedness that cuts through the notes to lay bare the images of sacrifice and suffering within. Messner’s tempi are often absurdly slow but they work for him.

Giulini’s recording has a similar air of reverence but lethargic tempi and variable singing prevent it from being a front-runner. Richard Hickox’s 1989 version, straightforward but in no sense uncaring, wears well, though his soprano and mezzo, Helen Field and Della Jones, are stronger than the two male soloists. Marcus Creed’s recent Berlin recording, which uses period instruments and a small specialist choir, has a pleasingly ‘personal’ feel to it. But the version I have returned to with most pleasure is Muti’s. He brings a sense of drama and spirituality to the piece and is well served by his soloists, notably the sweet-toned Catherine Malfitano and Agnes Baltsa, brooding and intense. Malfitano was the first singer to record the exquisite cadenza at the end of the ‘Sancta Mater’ which Rossini wrote for Clara Novello in 1850. Frittoli, who is at her best in this movement, also incorporates it, to winning effect.