During the winter, New College Choir broadcast Mozart’s Requiem live, as Oxford’s contribution to Radio 3’s Mozart-fest. Though we in the congregation sat in the college chapel while the performers were out of sight in the ante-chapel, the experience was deeply moving. Now New College’s Requiem has been released on CD (Novum NCR 1383). It’s not a transfer of the broadcast — spoken parts of the Mass, included in the broadcast, are omitted, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment replaces the European Union Baroque Orchestra. But the energy and precision director Edward Higginbottom extracts from his choir and injects into the big choruses remains, as does the gentle beauty of the quieter sections.

In a sleeve note, Higginbottom claims the recording is “unique in two mutually supportive ways”. They are the use of soloists drawn from the chorus — including boys singing soprano and alto solos — combined with a period instrument orchestra. The effectiveness of this line-up is immediately evident: the OAE’s raw, insistent, violins in the Requiem aeternam match the boy treble voices exactly, grabbing you by the throat, and setting a sombre atmosphere. Higginbottom does, however, emphasise that this a work of musical contrasts: he follows up with an electrifying Dies Irae, and a lightly stated march beat in Hostias et preces. This in turn contrasts with an epic-scale Sanctus. But to me the most moving movement is the gentle Benedictus, with its boy and adult soloists (Jonty Ward, James Swash, Guy Cutting, and Jonathan Howard) blending to telling effect.

Although this is actually an expertly engineered ‘studio’ recording made over three days in St Michael’s, Summertown, there’s all the feeling of immediacy and calculated risk-taking that you get in a good live performance. Higginbottom may have been at New College for 35 years, but his interpretations simply go on getting more and more exciting.