Recordings of Schubert’s sacred music don’t exactly grow on trees, and even though his final Mass is perhaps the best-known of his church works, it’s good to have a new recording by a high-profile ensemble and conductor. It was the only one of his six Masses that he didn’t live to hear, and Franz Welser-Möst endorses the view of the work as Schubert’s own Requiem – an interpretation also pursued by Lorraine Byrne Bodley in her new biography of the composer (see page 130).

It could also stand as Schubert’s Missa solemnis, given its scale (although still less expansive than Beethoven’s magnum opus) and his unprecedentedly acute response to the text. The mortally ill composer had an uneasy and unorthodox relationship with his Catholic faith and habitually omitted from the Credo not only the words extolling the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church but also those anticipating the resurrection of the dead and the afterlife. Added to his advanced harmony and highly individual orchestration, this combines in a work that thus becomes not only a public statement but also an intensely personal one.

It’s clearly a work that’s close to Welser-Möst’s heart and he shapes and paces this live performance (shorn of applause) with sensitivity and evident affection. The two tenors and soprano Joélle Harvey combine well in an ‘Incarnatus’ with an ideal touch of italianità, and the other soloists are fine elsewhere. The Severance Hall acoustic contributes to a beautiful blend, with especially characterful woodwind solos. Only the choir seems a little soft-grained, offering a dynamically limited and consonant-light performance with a muted response to the drama of the text. There is little sense of catharsis at the close of the Credo or of exultation at the end of the Sanctus: turn instead to Richard Hickox with the period instruments of Collegium Musicum 90 for choral singing that’s brimming with the fire-power and full-throated attitude that are, frustratingly, missing from this otherwise admirable recording.