Brahms's piano parts are wonderfully effective in transmitting the musical substance, but, shorn of orchestral colour, the emphasis is shifted to the quality and colour of the vocal writing, and the role of soprano and baritone soloists takes on an enhanced significance. Hanno Müller-Brachmann is ideally and urgently eloquent in his two solos, and Susan Gritton is refulgent and confiding in 'Ihr hab nun traurigkeit', Brahms's inspired elegy for his mother. Throughout, the choral component is superbly sung and beautifully balanced, Stephen Cleobury directing the King's College voices with an unerring sense of long line and the sustained building of paragraphs.