When the signed commission for a Requiem arrived from the French government, Berlioz wrote to his sister: ‘At first my brains boiled over. I was dizzy. Today the eruption has been regulated.’ In the finished work the eruptions are greatly outnumbered by the passages of regulation or reflection, and any performance has to give these introvert moments their due.

The brass fanfares here blow your socks off. But once you get beyond the ‘Dies irae’ and the ‘Rex tremendae’, things are not quite so happy. The chorus men are excellent but the sopranos, though sounding beautiful, make very little of the text audible. Also, in the more reflective moments I could do with Davis’s more positive shaping of phrases. The ‘Quaerens me’ here comes over as rather dull, which it is truly not, partly due to the curiously unfocused tone that obtains in many of the quieter choral moments.

But the most curious thing of all is the placing of the solo tenor in the Sanctus. Frank Lopardo is of the heroic kind, which is par for the course – for me, no one can touch Léopold Simoneau’s melting top notes and probably never will, and it’s a pity that in other areas Charles Munch’s blazing 1959 performance shows its age. But to try to soften Lopardo’s heroics by putting him in a distant corridor was not a solution.

Finally, speeds. Spano is faster than Davis in every movement. Mostly this works, and I jibbed only in the first movement, which verges at times on the perfunctory, and in the over-hectic ‘Confutatis maledictis’, as if from an opéra-comique on some forbidden substance. On the credit side, the orchestral playing is first-rate and the choral tuning impeccable. I would put the final score at the end of Judgement Day at Eruptions 10, Regulations 7.