Aside from a crooked entry here and there, Paavo Järvi’s anniversary account of the German Requiem, performed a century and a half to the day after its premiere, has much more in common with the studio-recorded symphony cycle from the same forces than it does with his 2009 recording, made live in Frankfurt for Virgin (now Erato, 7/11). Smaller, more flexible instrumental forces, for one thing, attentive to all the dynamic hairpins that impart life to long phrases taken in a single breath, both vocally and musically speaking. Where in Frankfurt the third movement built surely towards its Handelian climax, Järvi now arrests and now urges on the accompaniment to mirror the faltering steps of Matthias Goerne’s restless penitent, summoning a mighty blaze from nowhere at the movement’s point of crisis to launch the fugue in impetuous style.

A sense of momentum as well as occasion lends an unusual spirit of celebration, quite alien to both the sombre tread of most symphonic performances and the carefully cultivated archaism of ‘period’ accounts by Gardiner, Herreweghe and Norrington. The energy and sound world more nearly approach the chamber-orchestral intimacy of gesture I found so appealing about Frieder Bernius’s Carus recording when placing it top of my Collection pile (4/08). One feature in common to both performances from Frankfurt and Bremen is the use of a small, professional chorus: the State Choir of Järvi’s native Latvia in this case, singing for him with virtuoso attention to text.

There are casualties along the way, notably any still point of repose: the adrenalin generated by the big climaxes of the second and third movements spills into ‘How lovely are thy dwellings’, taken at one-in-a-bar, and even Valentina Farcas’s solo, which is scaled not for the microphone but to reach the far corners of Bremen Cathedral. The Requiem’s premiere did not feature the fifth movement, which Brahms added later at the suggestion of his teacher, but the performance’s ‘authentic’ credentials are more compromised by the presence of a chamber organ at floor level. Something like a ‘making of’ documentary would have placed the performance in useful context: we’re left with a cursory booklet note and the atmosphere of a one-off occasion which does not transfer itself to film with the special insights of Welser-Möst (Belvedere, 5/17), taking his Cleveland Orchestra to St Florian, or Abbado and his Berliners in Vienna (EuroArts, 9/14), marking the centenary of the composer’s death.