John Eliot Gardiner’s earlier recording of the Missa solemnis was a landmark event. Reviewing the disc in these columns, John Steane noted that, had it been available while he was writing his survey of recordings of the work for Choral Music on Record (Cambridge: 1991, ed Alan Blyth), he would have judged it the best of all. And, indeed, it remains a leading contender as a ‘library’ recommendation.

There are those, I know, who find that 1991 performance stronger on the work’s dramatic element than on what is rather vaguely termed its ‘spiritual dimension’. But that’s a judgement which could equally be levelled at the live 1940 Toscanini account or even Klemperer’s hair-raisingly dramatic 1951 Vox recording (6/53 – nla), a version which I’ve long thought hors concours. If we’re to distinguish between what, down the years, have been the most widely admired and collected versions of the Missa solemnis – a list which would also include Philippe Herreweghe’s memorable 1995 Harmonia Mundi recording and the famously well played and eloquently sung 1965 Karajan – it might be useful to use different terms of reference.

When Hilary Finch in The Times reviewed the live Barbican performance on which this new Gardiner recording is based, she spoke of Gardiner’s determination to reveal the sheer awe and terror within the music: ‘Praise and adoration seemed themselves by-products of fear in the blast of raw, hard-edged voices that was the Gloria.’ There is ‘awe and terror’ aplenty in that great 1951 Klemperer recording, alongside moments of deep calm and radiant beauty, as there are in this live Gardiner account. Herreweghe has always taken a more proportionate view of the music, one that (for want of a better word) is more ‘humane’. It’s also, like the earlier Gardiner version, a performance which more readily accommodates itself to the gramophone and the demands of repeated listening.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this blistering and yet at times often profoundly moving new account of the work is one which complements the 1991 version rather than supplants it. The newer version demands to be heard. Such is the visceral intensity of the music-making, a certain girding of the loins may be required before a second hearing, but isn’t that precisely how it should be with a work of this power and magnitude?