On their own – rather than singing in consort with other choruses as they do on several previous recordings – the professional members of the Swedish Radio Choir form one of the smallest ensembles on record to take on the full-orchestral version of the German Requiem. Unanimity of attack and suavity of tone are two obvious and immediate benefits of such a period-inclined approach, even if it hardly aligns with the choral-society forces Brahms was writing for. I find the core of the choir’s sound more diffuse – and less distinctively Swedish-schooled – than in its glory days under its founder, Eric Ericson, but the sopranos still project the long, forte arch of ‘Selig sind die Toten’ like angels with celestial lungs.

And the drawbacks? Discreetly boosted in the mix for the grand summations of the second, third and sixth movements, the choir’s modest size and backward placing only become noticeable in the consoling paragraphs of the outer movements, where Daniel Harding’s thoughtful blend of vocal and instrumental textures risks smoothing over the articulation of Brahms’s carefully chosen text, for all the shaded vowels and dotted consonants on show.

Harding’s direction is unhurried, true to both the letter and the spirit of Brahms’s score. His shaping of ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen’ as an intermezzo (with burbling clarinets given a helping hand by the engineers) is especially acute, and he gives everything to the third movement’s great moment of spiritual crisis, where the harrowing cries of ‘Wes soll ich mich trösten?’ are answered and assuaged by the dawning revelation of ‘Ich hoffe an dir’. Also recorded in Stockholm, Furtwängler touched the sublime at this point, but Harding runs him close.

In building the movement’s tension to that pitch of intensity, Harding enjoys the estimable advantage of Matthias Goerne as a magnificently careworn and world-weary philosopher. Between them they paint the sixth movement’s vision of a new Jerusalem with hushed wonder and expectation, quite distant from the pilgrims’ trudge of old. Only Christiane Karg’s solo disappoints, tightly sung with a quick vibrato much better suited to the penitent Gretchen on Harding’s fine recording of Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust’ (BR-Klassik, 12/14). Overall, however, this Requiem finds its proper context not in Brahms’s self-consciously assimilated heritage of Handel and Schütz but in Mozart and Schumann, not so pointedly as Rattle’s Gramophone Award-winning recording (EMI/Warner, 5/07) but with a gravity, unspoiled by austerity, that speaks to the heart of the piece.