For all his industry and popular success in the oratorio genre, Carl Loewe is almost exclusively associated outside Germany with songs and ballads such as ‘Tom der Reimer’. Given the lack of recordings available, it would be gratifying to announce that this Passion is the piece to set the record straight. Gratifying but disingenuous: the shelves of English church music libraries already groan with yellowing copies of devotional works as well written and practical for Passiontide choirs and congregations as they are sincere in expression and modest in ambition.

Dating from 1847, Das Sühnopfer (‘The Expiatory Sacrifice of the New Covenant’) opens in a sombre C minor and remains there for much of its 100 minutes. There are Mendelssohnian moments such as a brief F minor scena for Mary Magdalene and female chorus, but the comparison does Loewe no favours. In harmonising the chorales, he borrows heavily on 17th- and 18th-century models compiled by Johann Kuhnau, while his own inclination tends towards the well-trodden path.

Fashioned by a hymn researcher and teacher in Loewe’s adopted home of Stettin, the libretto follows North German Passion models in its alternation of biblical narrative with lyrical reflection. Any distinction between them is diffused and integrated by Loewe in sharing what would otherwise be separate parts for an Evangelist and Christus between the four soloists, though the tenor still takes the lion’s share of the work.

Having recorded a pair of oratorios by Graun, a Berlin contemporary of Bach, these forces bring the same period pitch, German Baroque performance style and acutely musical sensitivity to bear on Das Sühnopfer. A rival Naxos album from 2006 works within the same parameters but it’s a live recording, with attendant slips in tuning and ensemble. Working under studio conditions in a softly resonant Munich church, Thomas Gropper secures a much more polished performance. Try No 30, an airborne chorus for Zion’s daughters supported by a delicately vaulted cello line, and if Loewe’s blend of hand-me-down Bach and Schumann appeals, this new recording offers every incentive to investigate further.