Lured to St Petersburg in December 1787 by the Russian court’s insatiable appetite for Italian opera, Cimarosa immediately found himself faced with an unexpected commission: for a Messa da Requiem to mark the sudden death of the wife of the French ambassador. As Keith Anderson rightly warns in his informative note, it would be unfair to compare Cimarosa’s hastily composed Requiem with Mozart’s unfinished masterpiece of four years later. There is little drama, even less terror or anguish (the Day of Judgement passes with barely a shudder). The prevailing tone is of dignified solemnity and muted sorrow, with the sequence of (mainly) brief movements given sufficient variety by the alternation of chorus and solos, block harmony and imitative textures.

The composer whom Stendhal once dubbed the greatest Italian musical poet of love shows himself an adept contrapuntist in the stern fugues at “Amen” and “Cum sanctis tuis”. Once or twice opera buffa levity creeps in. The “Tuba mirum”, with solo soprano egged on by blithely tootling horns, must surely be the jauntiest-ever depiction of the last trumpet. But there is some noble, deeply felt music here, whether in the “Inter oves” trio for soprano, alto and bass (a quasi-operatic ensemble given a sober ecclesiastical makeover) or the Benedictus, with the solo soprano’s elegiac song answered by soft choral monotones.

This all-Slovakian performance is acceptable, if some way from ideal. The choral singing is longer on full-throated enthusiasm than tonal subtlety, and textures tend to blur in the resonant acoustic. Rhythms can plod – not altogether inappropriate to a Requiem, you might say, though the music would certainly have benefited from lighter bow strokes and more variety of accent. The two women soloists are both fine, especially the shining-toned soprano Adriana Kucerová. But the men make an unalluring pair, the bass gluey, the tenor unpleasantly raw in alt, nowhere more so than his long-held top B flat at “Preces meae non sunt dignae” – a note to have you running for cover.