With Arche, Jörg Widmann has (at the age of 45) delivered the kind of history-of-everything evening-length oratorio that, in retrospect, seems an inevitable point of arrival for his music, requiring for its fulfilment only the particular no-strings-attached (‘but make it big’) commission attendant upon the consecration of a new concert hall: in this case, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Mahler and Tippett would blush for shame.

In the beginning, pitchless rustles and whispers yield at length to clusters, biblical pronoucements and then more abruptly to a bloated send-up of Heine’s exemplary anti-Romantic credo Das Fräulein stand am Meere – if, that is, irony is any statement of belief. Fittingly for a student of Wolfgang Rihm, Widmann gives God the rough side of his tongue. Honed over the years, his application of parody technique is so comprehensively inventive, down to the final ‘Dona nobis pacem’ done up as a Lutheran Christmas hymn, that the entire history of German music from Bach to, well, Widmann is experienced as if in a seaside chamber of distorting mirrors.

Rather as fish became frogs, or gods became men, the meaning of arche suffered a fascinating etymological shift in early-Classical Athens from ‘source’ to ‘rule’. Creation and Flood myths done and dusted, the postdiluvian half of Arche contends in complementary fashion that all you need is (you’ve guessed it) love. And peace. Cue more hall-of-mirrors Schumann and Schubert. Murder and apocalypse meanwhile have their say, like Alcibiades at the Symposium.

German critics were divided at the premiere. ‘More pomp than soul’; ‘new music that is so old an audience immediately appreciates it’. A film would at least let us in on all the theatrics that gave the audience the giggles. The audio-only record lacks nothing for flair, energy and commitment to Widmann’s world of convinced irony. Well-drilled choral forces cut through orchestral textures as queasily luscious as a mango on the turn, testament not least to the new hall’s exacting acoustic and ECM’s spacious engineering. Playing Noah and an incensed Lied-baritone, Thomas E Bauer never forsakes the centre of an eloquent baritone that lends distinction to a new Christmas Oratorio on Naxos. Marlis Petersen would do a marvellous Gepopo on the strength of her abandoned melisma, cooing and coloratura. Is Arche a new Mask of Time? Or a Petite Macabre? Time will tell.