Explicitly counterpoised to the Latin Requiem, Brahms’s first great work was intended as an act of what Wolfgang Sandberger calls ‘civic consolation’. Its first performance in Bremen, still incomplete, was an act of cultural skywriting on Brahms’s part, his own score interspersed with movements by Bach, Tartini, Schumann and Handel: a young-but-mature composer – Brahms was 35 in 1868 – inscribing himself in a larger tradition and against a background of rising Prussian self-awareness. This recreation of the original performance, with its massed forces, is controlled with modest authority by Kent Nagano and registered with great precision as well as the fullest sense of the collectivities involved. It may startle those who grew up on the completed work, but it provides an illuminating commentary on its origins and mood.

★★★★