Their ‘How lovely is thy dwelling-place’ has a nimble, self-effacing sweetness…Bevan consoles with richly penetrating ardour…Pianists Richard Uttley and James Baillieu glide ably through, generating impressive momentum in ‘Behold, all flesh is as the grass’…It’s modest, unshowy. Brahms without grandeur, Brahms translated.

The Choir of King’s College London sing with such relaxed assuredness that one almost feels they have been reunited with an old friend. The intonation on ‘Behold, all flesh is as the grass’ and the climactic ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord’ is English choral singing at its best, and Joseph Fort keeps the pace steady and neither hurried nor mournfully drawn-out. A model recovery of a much-loved piece in its original costume.

A well-paced account that achieves a calm and noble strength of expression in the symmetrical outer pillars.

[The performance] really is pretty good ... it has plenty of excitement with the plunging pianos bringing out the string figurations to massive effect.

This recording uses similar forces to those who gathered in a fashionable Wimpole Street drawing room in 1871, but revises the piano part to more closely reflect the textures of Brahms’s orchestration. This produces an intimate, highly charged chamber performance, brightly, but sometimes too lightly, sung by this young choir, with exemplary enunciation.