Two German Requiems appear almost simultaneously, with a number of similarities but also, as is evident from the repertoire lists above, a striking difference.

Both are performances that respond to the inner drama of a work that can in less imaginative hands appear static. Even in the slower music in both projects there is a sense of involvement from all the musicians that contributes to a feeling of motion and of inevitability throughout the long and large Requiem. It is a work whose extensive forces – including massed choirs both in Norway and in Germany, alongside a Romantic-size orchestra – suit the engineering styles of both Chandos’s and BIS’s recording teams. The atmospheres of the Grieghallen and the Grosser Saal of the Elbphilharmonie are as much participants in the respective sound pictures as the players and singers, and while only Nagano’s Requiem is listed as a live recording, there is no less an aura of liveness to the sound of Gardner’s. The Chandos recording takes a slightly more panoramic view, with the choir seeming a little more distant in comparison with the BIS recording. Gardner’s baritone, Brian Mulligan, calls as if into an infinity to know the measure of his days; the more ardently tenorial tone of Jóhann Kristinsson for Nagano matches Mulligan in dramatic presence, although the slightly closer miking brings his plea into the here and now. Similarly, the depth of repose in more gentle music (such as ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen’) provides a greater oasis of contrast in Bergen than in Hamburg. All the choirs, though, sing tirelessly and faultlessly, with degrees of accuracy and coordination that can only be the result of the highest-quality training.

So to the striking difference. Whereas Gardner presents the Requiem in its familiar seven-movement form, Nagano seeks to recreate the circumstances of the premiere, on Good Friday 1868, of a near-complete work. Thus the soprano solo, ‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’, is absent; in come organ-accompanied violin solos by Bach, Tartini and Schumann, placed between the Requiem’s third and fourth movements, and an appendix (flowing over on to a second disc) of ‘Erbarme dich’ and three segments from Messiah. Violinist Veronika Eberle stands in admirably for Joachim, mezzo Kate Lindsey for his wife Amalie, who sang the Bach and Handel solos. It is a personal matter whether single movements in such arrangements – or, indeed, a not-quite-complete Requiem – are ideal for repeated listening, or whether you’d necessarily wish to hear your Brahms with the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus as its conclusion. The integrity of the recreation is, however, unimpeachable, and the distinction of the performance, like Gardner’s, is its own recommendation.