These days the 18th century’s most famous torso – one of the most recorded pieces in the classical catalogue – comes in assorted guises. What we get here is the overhaul of the familiar Süssmayr version of the Requiem by the American pianist-scholar Robert Levin. This is less radical than the reworkings by Duncan Druce and Richard Maunder but will still surprise the unwary.

Levin’s most drastic deviations from the traditional text are the new fugues at the end of the Sequenz (an austere, angular piece based on Mozart’s own sketch) and the Sanctus, where he convincingly expands Süssmayr’s cough-and-you-miss it fugato. While his intervention elsewhere is often confined to lightening Süssmayr’s textures and correcting his clumsy part-writing, there are more far-reaching changes in the Benedictus and (more controversially) the Agnus Dei. Most of Levin’s rethinking is plausibly ‘Mozartian’, though not always an unarguable improvement on Süssmayr, who for all his limitations did have the unbeatable advantage of being close to Mozart in the last weeks of his life.

Of a handful of previous recordings of the Levin edition, the best is the powerfully dramatic version from Sir Charles Mackerras on Linn, marred only by some tired intonation from the choral sopranos. On this new disc the Atlanta sopranos, too, can sag in soft, sustained passages. This apart, the 70-strong choir, though slightly recessed in the balance, sing with fervour and cope adroitly with Runnicles’ zestful tempi for the Kyrie and ‘Quam olim Abrahae’ fugues. Orchestral detail is sensitively shaped (listen, for instance, to the doleful lilt Runnicles brings to the ‘Lacrimosa’) and the soloists are good, with Eric Owens sonorous and saturnine in the ‘Tuba mirum’. In many ways, then, this is an impressive performance, on an ample scale but never soggily reverential. Yet ultimately it lacks the vision and sharpness of focus of Mackerras, who often chooses near-identical tempi but, with a leaner, more astringent sound palette, makes them sound that much more urgent. The Mackerras recording adds Mozart’s C minor Adagio and Fugue, whereas Telarc earns itself a black mark by demanding full price for a mere 47 minutes of music.