Given its German text and the composer’s own German roots, Delius’s A Mass of Life – arguably his greatest masterpiece – might seem an odd choice of work for Mark Elder to take to Bergen in his new capacity as principal guest conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Norway, however, was not only for much of his life Delius’s spiritual home (he even built a summerhouse in Gudbrandsdalen, some 435 miles inland from Bergen), but also the place where he first read (or, in Eric Fenby’s words, ‘devoured’) the book that provided the work’s text: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. In the mid-1890s, soon after the book’s complete publication, it provided the poetic basis for the fourth movement of Mahler’s Symphony no.3, as well as the more grandiose orchestral ambitions of Richard Strauss’s eponymous tone poem.

Perhaps more fully than either of those composers, however, Delius – who scorned organised religion – embraced the spirit of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch (‘superman’) in control of his own deeds and destiny, not in any dogmatic sense, but in order to fashion his own musical-poetic response. With its double choir, four soloists (with a particularly prominent baritone solo taking many of the words of the prophet Zarathustra/Zoroaster) and vast orchestra, it was his most ambitious project. On this new recording from LAWO Classics (sung in the original German), Elder brings the Bergen orchestra together with the Bergen Philharmonic Choir, the Edvard Grieg Kor (particularly apt given Delius’s close professional and personal ties with Grieg), and Bergen’s Collegium Musicum Choir.

The excellent quartet of soloists comprises soprano Gemma Summerfield, contralto Claudia Huckle, tenor Bror Magnus Tødenes and – with the lion’s share of the solo singing – baritone Roderick Williams. Together with the massed choirs, they project the text with enormous sensitivity and keenness, and the close, well-focused recording in Bergen’s Grieghallen ensures that their sound carries above Delius’s often expansive late-Romantic orchestration. Elder has re-examined the sparse expression marks in the score, adopting some but not all of the modifications of the work’s first great champion, Thomas Beecham, and making further alterations of his own. These not only help with the projection of the words, but also the pacing: where to allow the music space to breathe, and where to push on. Elder shows himself yet again a master of the long line (as he has already in his Hallé recordings of Wagner and Vaughan Williams, among much else), and of carefully building to the music’s climaxes while remaining ever attentive to detail along the way.

This is a work that hits the ground running with the great choral exclamation, ‘O thou, my will!’, and there are moments in Part I where it approaches Mahlerian, Straussian and Wagnerian grandeur. Yet the overwhelming impression of this performance is the way it brings out the music’s refined beauties: the solo soprano, alto and tenor exchanges in Part I’s long central movement, and particularly the exquisite alto and soprano passages in its latter stages. Roderick Williams makes a commanding and wonderfully sympathetic central figure, ripe with wisdom in words, tone and phrasing, yet far from ancient.

Although the latter stages of Part II were completed and performed as early as 1899, most of the work was completed in 1905, and the first complete performance came only in 1909. What is striking from this performance is the huge stylistic range encompassed in the Mass, from unbridled late-Romantic fervour to a rapt and delicate beauty that is more forward-looking. The long introduction to Part II may contain Romantic tropes such as the obligatory horn calls, yet the way in which it is cushioned recalls the restrained, ‘holy’ eloquence of Wagner’s Parsifal. The wordless chorus that follows the orchestral introduction to Part II’s third movement, cast in compound dotted time, anticipates the Ravel of Le Tombeau de Couperin (a reminder that Delius was soaking up the cultural atmosphere and making contacts in Paris as early as 1888). As the work relates the progress of life to the times of the day, the next movement evokes the heat of noon, with double-reed solos harking back to Act 3 of Tristan. Elder brings out the deeper textures, too, when the baritone asks ‘Did I not fall into the well of eternity?’, highlighting the suggestive bassoon writing. The movement ends with music, singing and playing of the utmost delicacy and expressive depth.

The culmination of the Mass is the long closing movement, whose waves of shimmering ecstasy wash over the listener like balm. For all its lush scoring, there’s an uncluttered radiance to this music in Elder’s expert hands. As the penultimate section of text declares, ‘The world is deep, Deeper than day can comprehend’. It’s the disarming simplicity of its depths that remain with the listener long after the disc has stopped playing. There’s no coupling – that would surely have been a distraction from this marvellous performance – and that is reflected in the attractive price. Recording and presentation (with fine booklet notes from Nordic music authority Andrew Mellor) play their part in making this an essential Delius disc.

Of all the composer’s who might embody the qualities of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, surely the most obvious is not Wagner (still less Richard Strauss!), but Ludwig van Beethoven. His own magnum opus, the astonishing (and astonishingly difficult) Missa solemnis receives a new recording with period-instrument forces under the direction of the indefatigable Jordi Savall. Following soon after his widely-admired cycle of Beethoven symphonies and late Schubert, it confirms him as one of today’s great HIP Beethovenians. With an impressive team of soloists alongside the Capella Nacional de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations, this is a beautifully-paced performance, sympathetically recorded in the Collégiale de Cardona (and a vast improvement acoustically on the first volume of the symphony cycle). Using a chorus of just 36, this is a reading that captures the intricacies of the part-writing without sacrificing the broader picture. In fact, there are few other recordings of this work that so successfully combine beauty of utterance, spaciousness, incisiveness and devotion (the ‘Andacht’ marked in Beethoven’s score). If Delius’s Mass is fundamentally anti-religious, Beethoven’s is Humanist: a quality that shines through this account on Alia Vox AVSA9956.