Britten’s War Requiem touched a trapped nerve in the collective psyche of post-war Britain, commemorating the war dead with both solemn liturgy and intimately personal poetry. The 60th anniversary of the Decca recording is an opportune moment to return to a classic of the gramophone with a new remastering. After the fashion of the latest Solti Ring (explored in detail, 11/22), it is issued at something more than full price, on LP, SACD and streaming services, with the Spatial Audio version available to Apple Music subscribers.

Three specific matters of substance and perception illustrate the work of the remastering engineer, Philip Siney. From a corner of the gallery of Kingsway Hall, the boys of Highgate School Choir sound distant but clear on both the original LPs and the 2013 remastering for Decca’s Originals. In Spatial Audio, there is now a distinct sense of them singing behind and above the listener, as they would be in (say) the Royal Albert Hall. On SACD and the new LPs, the effect is more subtle, as though the boys had moved forwards a few steps.

The boys are now at around 225 degrees of a circle, or 7.30pm on a clock face. More disconcerting is Galina Vishnevskaya’s first entry for the ‘Liber scriptus’, at 9pm, or almost exclusively in the left channel. In his memoir of the recording (reprinted in the SACD and LP sets), producer John Culshaw detailed the initial trouble he had with the soprano, and with persuading her to sing in the gallery with the choir and not with the male soloists on stage. Previous remasterings have placed her nearer the centre, and nearer the choir, and while the new version may more accurately reflect the original layout, I don’t find it an improvement.

At 0'54"-1'00" of the ‘Liber scriptus’, a tube train ran below Kingsway Hall, as they do on innumerable Decca and EMI recordings. Not any longer: the new remastering has removed all trace of the low rumble. Would Culshaw have approved such an edit? Would you miss it if you weren’t switching between headphones and hi-fis and sources? Does it count as an improvement? The answers in my case are yes; no; maybe. The intervention is there all the same, and whether you regard it as an inconsequential piece of audio housekeeping or an artefact that belongs to the character of the original recording is a question of taste and perspective.

Less controversial – now, at any rate – is the LP of rehearsal excerpts that Britten rebuffed and withheld from release when it was first presented to him by Culshaw as a well-meaning 50th-birthday present. First issued with a 1999 remastering, this tightly cut 50-minute sequence illustrates (in mono) the composer’s affable authority over his performers and his courtesy and efficiency as a recording musician, and illuminates aspects of each movement as much as any programme note.

As a musical rather than technical document, the recording has attracted superlatives in these pages – ‘never to be surpassed’, ‘genuinely iconic’ – which (to me) undervalue the merits of more recent performances and the degree to which the piece itself is generous enough to embrace their complementary approaches to the score. Not everything in the Britten version lives up to the tremendous winding-up and catharsis of the ‘Libera me’. At least until that point, I prefer the consistently higher tension and biting accuracy of Mariss Jansons’s live version (BR-Klassik, 12/13), and the more reflective pace, more realistic perspectives and theatrically effective detail of Paul McCreesh (Signum, 10/13).

While the LP set is half as expensive again, it scores over the SACD not merely by virtue of nostalgia. The specific character of each soloist is that much more immediate on LP; not only the steely vibrancy and Russian Latin of Vishnevskaya but most of all the noble restraint and simple wrenching sadness of Fischer-Dieskau’s contributions. Here again, the Spatial Audio version exposes the joins, however smoothly made, between separate takes of the orchestral and ensemble sections, such as the segue into ‘Strange Meeting’ and the alternation between the two at the climax of the Offertorium. As well as Culshaw’s account of the sessions, the booklets for LP and SACD reprint the contents of the original set, adding session photographs, technical notes and reminiscences from Culshaw’s colleagues on set. The recording comes alive not as a definitive version but a document of and for its time.