With its easy, songful charm and pastoral “Benedictus” cast as a round (shades here of the “canon” quartet in Fidelio), the G major has always been the most popular of Schubert’s four early Masses. The rarely heard (outside Austria) C major, D452 - likewise intended for Schubert’s parish church in the Viennese suburb of Lichtental—is less attractive, and in many ways the most retrospective of the four. Sections such as the jolly “Kyrie” and the ingenuous minuet setting of “Dona nobis pacem” could have come straight out of one of Mozart’s less inspired Salzburg Masses. But the 19-year-old Schubert reveals his harmonic adventurousness in the “Gratias – Domine Deus” and the “Er incarnatus est”, while the “Benedictus” is a limpid soprano solo designed for the composer’s first love, Therese Grob. Both these compact Latin Masses are far more appealing than the (to my ears) tedious German Mass of 1827, a sequence of simple congregational hymns in a style somewhere between Ancient & Modern and Schubert’s blandest, most gemütlich part-songs.

Recorded in a slightly swimmy church acoustic, Morten Schuldt-Jensen and his Leipzig forces (orchestra and mixed-voice choir both numbering around 25) give agreeable, straightforward performances…But Schuldt-Jensen’s buoyant tempi and the freshness of the choral response do much to vindicate the rococo auto-bustle of parts of the C major Mass. The assorted soloists, led in both Latin Masses by Claudia Reinhard’s bright, rather fragile soprano, all have light “early music” voices. If the bass sounds strained in the high-lying “Benedictus” of D167, the singers blend well in ensemble, not least in the poignant “Et incarnatus” of the C major Mass.