With forces a fraction of those envisaged by the composer and not a single Czech or English native among the soloists, Philippe Herreweghe leads a devoted if not authentically proportioned account of the Requiem Dvořák finally agreed to write for the Birmingham Festival in 1891, having turned down their request six years earlier for a Dream of Gerontius. Only the lack of string weight proves telling in the ‘Confutatis’ and other big moments, which in the work’s first half come few and far between.

The soloists are well matched to Herreweghe’s intimately scaled reverence, with Ilse Eerens floating a lovely, fresh tone in the ‘Graduale’, to which the winds and female chorus respond in kind. When Dvořák’s inspiration rises in the Requiem’s second half, so does the heat of Herreweghe’s direction: he proves himself sensible to the impact of Wagner on the Sanctus-Benedictus, where Die Meistersinger, Parsifal and (especially) the first act of Die Walküre make their presence felt in enjoyably swift and unembarrassed succession. By the same token, he takes care over the G minor-G major cadences of the ‘Pie Jesu’, which Dvořák gracefully appropriated from the opening phrase of his previous large-scale work, the Eighth Symphony.

Were I then seeking a distinct, modern alternative to the monumental but impassioned conviction of Mariss Jansons’s Concertgebouw performance (RCO Live, 7/10), this would be a contender – but only, I think, in the audio version welcomed warmly by Malcolm Riley (PHI, 6/15). Issued on film, the presentation is a bit of a disgrace. There is no booklet note. The credits list eight camera operators but the angles available in the deSingel hall seem frustratingly limited, and mostly to side-on close-ups, though naturally not for Herreweghe himself. This was not a hastily arranged re enactment of a 1980s Karajan/Telemondial production but it sure looks like one.