‘Mozart Requiem*’, says the cover, the asterisk leading to the rubric ‘Version Paris, 1804’. Thirteen years after Mozart’s death and four after the Requiem was finally published, it finally received its first performance in France – although not in anything like its familiar form. For a start, Parisian orchestras had no access to basset-horns, so a pair of cors anglais were pressed into service, offering a rather different quality of plangency, especially in the ‘Recordare’. Mozart’s Introit was preceded by the equivalent movement from Jommelli’s already-famous Requiem, and the ‘Kyrie’ fugue omitted – as were the Offertorium, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. The central Sequence is given complete – well, almost, the final ‘Amen’ being omitted and the ‘Cum sanctis’ fugue from the end of the work taking its place. And listen to the way the Parisians made the most of the Last Trump at the outset of the ‘Tuba mirum’! The whole thing is over in a little more than 26 minutes, and 10 per cent of that is from another work altogether.

Fascinating and musicologically valuable though all this is, one can’t help feeling at times that Mozart’s poor old Requiem has been chopped up and manhandled quite enough recently. The omission of so much music means that this performance must remain a curio rather than a reference version. Nevertheless, it makes one hope that Julien Chauvin and Le Concert de la Loge get the chance soon to tackle the work in a more complete form. The assurance with which they and the Namur Chamber Choir approach the work make the prospect of something closer to the ‘traditional’ version of the Requiem from these quarters rather an enticing one.

Around the same time in France, Napoleon was proclaiming himself emperor – a seismic event in European history and one that had its most memorable musical repercussions in Vienna, with the brutal renaming of a heroic symphony. Closer to home, however, Napoleon required music for his coronation and turned to the Paris-based Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello. His Messe pour le sacre de Napoléon favours melody over the counterpoint that imbues the Mozart, and its tone is lightened by the presence of flutes, oboes and, in the ‘Gratias’, chuckling clarinets. It doesn’t get the 300-strong forces of the coronation, arrayed around Notre-Dame, but this far more calorie-controlled performance reveals it as a work of considerable imagination and charm.