The cover blurb claims that although “Schütz would never have heard his music performed by forces such as these and on such a scale – surely he would have been a strong advocate of this astounding aural experience”. That strikes me as pointless hyperbole because it is just as likely that the Dresden Kapellmeister would have found such choral singing excessively overblown, mushy, lacking in transparent contrapuntal detail, and alien to his musical aesthetic. There is no need to justify this recording by unrealistically invoking the composer’s consent. These performances present a modern view of one way in which to perform this music, and the National Youth Choir of Great Britain’s conductor Mike Brewer deserves enormous credit for teaching 140 young singers to appreciate and perform a range of Schütz’s splendid music (there are 32 tenors; Schütz most likely had two or three but these young voices only seldom stray too far beyond the music’s natural parameters). The reverberant acoustic of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh is swampier than would be ideal for other approaches to this repertoire but it actually serves to help the choir. The thick warm sound of the full choir rings around the soaring acoustic, obscuring some occasionally approximate tuning and uneven sopranos. However, on the whole the choral singing is admirably disciplined and contoured. The most impressive passages tend to be the fullest homophonic sections which close pieces; but “So fahr ich hin zu Jesu Christ” shows that the choir is also adept at music requiring lighter and flexible singing.