In the beginning was Deutsche Grammophon. Only such a major label, one suspects, could have taken on so monumental a project as Paul McCreesh's gloriously successful recording of Haydn's The Creation in English. From the very opening bars of the performance, I heard some of the most luxurious period-instrument sounds that I have ever experienced in a recorded medium. Perhaps it was the herd of some ten cellos, or the many flocks of violins. On the other hand, it could have been a result of microphones numberless, or just a glorious heavenly hierarchy of engineers and producers. But however the magnificent sound was achieved, this is a recording of The Creation where heavy beasts tread, tigers leap, eagles soar and the heavens tell. So it is all the more disturbing to learn that McCreesh and the German recording label have recently announced the end of what has been a most fruitful partnership (one that has seen the release of some thirty recordings over fifteen years): the Gabrieli Consort & Players' most recent contract was not renewed. It is obvious, of course, that recording projects whose size approaches the magnitude of one such as McCreesh's reading of The Creation are already notoriously difficult to finance. Yet without the support of a multinational corporation like Deutsche Grammophon, it becomes even more challenging to make them a reality.

Any hint of this trouble apparently lay in the unknown future, however, when McCreesh, his Gabrieli Consort & Players, the chamber choir of Chetham's School of Music and distinguished soloists (Sandrine Piau, Miah Persson, Mark Padmore, Neal Davies and Peter Harvey) gathered in the fine acoustic of Watford Town Hall for this recording in 2006. On the agenda was a performance of proper late-eighteenth-century grandeur – the booklet lists 213 orchestral members and choral singers – complete with a newly adjusted English text. The performance of McCreesh's careful and, to my ears, successful solutions to the challenges of Gottfried van Swieten's problematic back-translation of the lost original English libretto is reason enough to own this recording. In this new guise, The Creation sounds, for once, like a piece that was composed to an English text rather than translated from the German (I'll return to this in a moment).

The orchestra and choir play and sing with a suppleness that is quite remarkable, given the substantial size of the ensemble as a whole. The soloists, who have to project over this vast body of musicians, sing with considerable subtlety, although some numbers are performed with reduced orchestral forces. Indeed, it is the smaller-scale numbers like Uriel's aria ‘In native worth and honour clad’ (just before the end of The Fifth Day) that are this recording's quiet triumph: Mark Padmore's well-modulated tenor soars above sensitive winds, attentive string accompanists and a lyrical cello section that is truly ‘orchestral’ in tone. Once the listener has become familiar with this recording, other versions – which use around four cellos – are likely to disappoint.

Success on a small scale is not to say that this interpretation of The Creation pulls its punches. Haydn's famous depiction of the sunrise out of the topical mists of the stile antico at the dawn of The Fourth Day, which begins with a wondrous pianissimo, is all the more striking for the ‘brightest splendour’ of the trumpets and timpani that mark the sun's progress over the horizon. Likewise, the choruses of praise that end the various subsections are – thanks, no doubt, to the work that went into rehearsing them – studies in choral discipline. McCreesh's singers can certainly sing loudly and softly, unlike many choirs that take on this sort of work.

To hear The Creation in English, and to hear it performed this well, is to hear a triumphant closing gesture of the Enlightenment in another way. In German, the oratorio takes its place as a precursor to a nineteenth-century canon of (German) masterworks, most notably Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Indeed, scholarly observers, including Lawrence Kramer, Matthew Head, Nicholas Mathew and Richard Kramer, have recently shone light on aspects of The Creation that include the ‘archaeologies’ (Head) of Haydn's ‘glorious work’ and its importance to the formation of the canon of grosse Werke (not to mention these works’ attendant glories). The story told by these musicologists is a mainly German one, relating the birth – from sublime chaos – of the heroic composer writing heroic music. The experience of The Creation in English, on the other hand, feels much more rooted. It evokes the British eighteenth century in all of its contradictions, with its worship of the exemplars of history – hence the Handelian choruses – and its love affair with the anti-historical and pseudo-naturalistic garden, the site of that wholly English mix of the pastoral and the picturesque. In other words, to listen attentively to The Creation in English is to discover a work with a past: the ghosts of George Frideric Handel and John Milton (not to mention the familiar textual cadences of the King James Version of the Bible) step to the foreground, and the sublimities of creation seem somehow less, well, overwhelming. If both Germany and England have appropriated the work and incorporated it into their national consciousnesses, in Germany the stakes have always been higher. Indeed, the idea of modern Germany, as we now know, was born in the days of The Creation: the famous performance to honour its composer on 27 March 1808, in the midst of nascent national resistance to Napoleon, must count as one of many ‘zero hours’ attendant on the birth of the German national spirit. The remarkable thing is that, when the work is sung in English, this crucial aspect of its early reception melts into air.

According to the website of the Gabrieli Consort & Players (<http://www.gabrieli.com>), McCreesh and his ensemble will perform The Creation on tour in 2009, thus offering a major contribution to the many events that commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of Haydn's death.