In a brief booklet-note, Vladimir Jurowski denounces the admittedly flaccid text of Haydn’s Seven Last Words as “an obstacle for people to understand the true greatness of the music”. The logical conclusion would be to present these lofty meditations in their rarely heard original orchestral guise. What we get in this performance, though, is a hybrid: in each of the Words except, curiously, the first, Jurowski plays the exposition in its orchestral version (though not always in Haydn’s original scoring), before continuing with a complete performance of the choral version. Perhaps to compensate for these (by Haydn) unscheduled exposition repeats, Jurowski takes several movements provocatively fast, as if in response to the composer’s fears that this extended sequence of slow movements might “tire the listener”. Despite fervent singing from the excellent LPO choir, the radiant vision of Paradise in the second Word lacks any sense of the sublime, with the murmurous cello arpeggios sounding merely busy. Similarly, at Jurowski’s tempo, the delicate violin figuration in the seventh Word emerges as skittish rather than ethereal. At least we might have anticipated a truly convulsive final Earthquake. Instead Jurowski confounds expectations by downgrading Haydn’s prescribed presto to a steady-as-she-goes allegro non troppo.

In fairness, Jurowski’s urgency is vindicated in the despairing fourth Word, with its grinding suspensions, and the violence of No 5, “I thirst”. Here and elsewhere the orchestral palette is aptly lean and astringent, with pared-down string tone and louring natural horns. A word, too, for the superb LPO wind, including a wonderfully pungent contrabassoon, in the austere, other-worldly interlude between Nos 4 and 5. The solo quartet, if occasionally over-loud, sings sensitively, with soprano Lisa Milne especially touching in the supplicatory tenderness of No 3. While I’m glad to have heard this, the palm for a choral Seven Last Words still goes to Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his Viennese period forces: far more broadly conceived than the LPO performance and realising that much more intensely the chromatic anguish and almost mystic ecstasy of this extraordinary music.