Choir members are the virtuosos here. Their flexibility enables them to enrich or bleach vocal colour, and flood or dry up volume levels, to the subtlest degree. Jacobs plays the choir like an instrument, as he does the band. The shapes he coaxes from words, and the force he provokes from the ensemble, open out the new dimensions of Dutron’s score.

Jacobs’s conducting...uses textural variation, urgent but flexibly shaped phrasing and the odd trick of rhetorical timing to keep the work light, briskly flowing and human in scale. As ever he has plenty of ideas, and the lithe and alert playing of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the firm singing of the RIAS Chamber Choir ensure that he is able to realise them with clarity and effective control of detail.

Dutron uses Süssmayr’s original material as a jumping-off point for his own inspiration rather than discarding it altogether...Many of the hallmarks which made Jacobs’s Mozart opera series so vital (minus, of course, the occasionally hyperactive continuo-playing which polarised opinion there!) are in evidence...and the four soloists (all alumni of the opera recordings) blend seamlessly with one another.

The results are sometimes stimulating, often jarring. There is fine work from the soloists under René Jacobs, and plenty of force in his direction, but the sopranos have a tendency to sing flat at the ends of phrases.