In this grand sweep of German sacred arias, covering more than 100 years from Bach in 1724 to Mendelsssohn’s Elijah in 1846, Thomas Quasthoff’s recital takes an example from the former to communicate his own theology: “Betrachte, meine Seel” (“contemplate, my soul”) devotionally, if reticently, conveys the scent of salvation in the solar plexus of Bach’s St John Passion. Quasthoff’s conviction, however, lies squarely with what religious music imparts for listeners who cannot “subscribe to the composers’ belief system”.

Take Quasthoff’s “music is my religion” mantra as you will, this is a programme which alights most compellingly on human vulnerability, through the singer’s instinctive and sympathetic poetics and malleable timbre – as he did in his profoundly moving disc of Bach Cantatas Nos 56 and 82 (1/05). If “Grosser Herr” and the ubiquitous Messiah extract (this and the bonus track, “Swing low, sweet chariot”, are sung in English, if curiously pronounced in places) sit a little pragmatically outside the larger context, Quasthoff creates his own world in the other Bach examples.

Like similar recitals darting between the sinews of great masterpieces, the impact of the gem in question never quite shines as it should. It sounds more like a compilation disc than a recital and this is where a more imaginatively linked concept might have brought more out of Quasthoff. The Haydn is often gloriously coloured and characterised but there isn’t much here which reaches the divine places we know this great singer can, and there are rare moments of tiredness.

The modern-instrument band delivers middle-of-the road support in the 18th-century music (a distinctly unexciting trumpet sound in tracks 1 and 6 – which DG muddle up from then on) but Mendelssohn is movingly accompanied and Quasthoff leaves us in radiant voice and the tantalising hope that, soon, he records Elijah in toto.