Sung by a small choir of young and expert voices, Brahms’s reduction of the Requiem for piano duet offers the occasional opportunity to peer behind its orchestral curtains to the work’s underpinnings. Schütz casts a dark shadow over the outer movements with some grave and restrained singing by the EuropaChorAkademie; but Brahms’s fondness for part-songs, his joshing and flirting with the ladies in his various choirs, illuminate the even-numbered movements with unlooked-for easy humour. Except for the soprano soloist, everyone seems to be having terrific fun, especially the pianists, whose clipped trot through her movement moves from demystification to impertinence.

Such release of tension is needed in the rehearsal room. But that’s where the arrangement, and even more the performance, leaves me stranded. The addition of the original timpani parts, suggested by the Belgian musicologist Heinrich Poos, only serves as a forceful reminder of what we’re missing. Daus reads “somewhat more lively” in the middle of the second movement as “half as quick again”, and dashes off both fugues with dispiriting triviality. The choir is some distance from the microphones in a reasonably airy studio, perhaps 30-strong – the booklet doesn’t say – but individual voices obtrude, the lack of strength in the lower parts suggests that they are all too youthful, and the sopranos should have been given the chance to retake the opening, breath-defying phrase of the last movement, which goes awry despite a tempo and character very far from Brahms’s “Solemn” marking. The versions by Cleobury (EMI, 11/06), Christophers (Coro) and especially Accentus with Laurence Equilbey (Naïve, 9/04) are all preferable in their own ways, and all more plausibly requiescal.