Over three decades ago Simon Rattle’s English-language Creation (EMI/Warner, 4/91) got pretty short shrift in these pages for ‘its air of impatience, rapid preparation, volatile pacing …’. I rather enjoyed it, above all for its sense of impish delight in Haydn’s boundless invention. I enjoyed this live new Munich recording even more. You can still argue with some of Rattle’s ideas, such as the jolt forwards and the ensuing tsunami when Raphael announces the Leviathan, and the hell-for-leather choral spurt at the climax of the hymn ‘Von deiner Güt’’ in Part 3. But from the atmospheric evocation of Chaos, with its spectral string pianissimos and properly eerie brass, Rattle and his superb Bavarian forces catch all of the oratorio’s teeming pictorial detail. The 50-strong choir conjure a shrouded sotto voce as God’s spirit moves over the waters, then create a cosmic blaze to rival all comers.

When the orchestra is at full throttle – I noticed this especially in ‘Die Himmel erzählen’ (aka ‘The heavens are telling’) – the choir suffer slightly in the balance. But the choral singing is both vigorous and, where apt, finely nuanced. ‘Stimmt an die Saiten’ (‘Awake the harp’), so often a cue for a full-throated bellow, dances athletically, the successive fugal entries incisive yet unaggressive. Few other choirs approach the Bavarians’ clarity of diction, or their control of dynamics. Even more than in his English-language recording, Rattle thrillingly vindicates his lightning pace for the closing stretches of ‘Die Himmel erzählen’.

In sheer exhilaration, then, this Creation is a match for any. Rattle also does full justice to the score’s awe and mystery: the first sunrise, majestically evoked, or Raphael’s hushed injunction to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, with its solemn, antique tread. Here and elsewhere Christian Gerhaher, his tone now rather more tenorish than it was on Harnoncourt’s recording (DHM, 5/04), brings to the music a lieder-singer’s verbal point and variety of colour – a touch of humour, too, in the first weather report and the zoological pageant in Part 2.

Benjamin Bruns, equally good with his words, is an ardent, lyrical Uriel, softening his tone sensitively for the first moonrise and the creation of woman. As Gabriel and a shyly awakening Eve, Lucy Crowe deploys her radiant soprano with grace and finesse. Perhaps the decorations in her avian aria teeter on the edge of parody. But her duet with Gerhaher’s Adam, with its gambolling woodwind, is delightful in its mingled affection and playfulness. It sets the seal on a superbly sung and played Creation that marries a sense of the ‘sublime’ – the quality most often cited by early listeners – with an infectious spirit of shared enjoyment, even fun.