Seven Last Words, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London ****

Haydn frankly acknowledged that the 1786 Cadiz Cathedral commission of seven consecutive orchestral slow movements for the Good Friday liturgy posed the severest test of his powers of varied invention. But he was proud enough of the result to issue arrangements of the resulting Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross for string quartet and for piano. And, chancing in 1795 to hear a provincial attempt to turn it into a choral piece, he reworked it for soloists, choir and orchestra too – enriching the scoring and adding a monumental wind-band interlude mid-way through.

The result, including an orchestral introduction and the brief but astonishingly violent concluding evocation of the earthquake after Christ's death, was a uniquely majestic and touching 10-movement sequence lasting well over an hour. If performances have remained rare, this is doubtlessly owing to its residual reputation for monotony – the last couple of minutes apart. So it was reassuring to behold a sold-out QEH for this Holy Week performance sung in German by the clear, firm-voiced Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment complete with period trombones and contrabassoon – and more rewarding still to hear a reading under the baton of Daniel Harding that made the most of the contrasts Haydn insinuated into his restricted brief.

But then Harding had chosen to warm up with one of the most extreme of Haydn's so-called sturm und drang middle-period symphonies, No 49 in F minor "La Passione" – albeit in a windmill conducting-style that at times looked more appropriate to a billowing Strauss tone poem. Nonetheless, something of the symphony's laconic tautness carried over in Harding's relatively urgent account of the austere Introduction to the Seven Last Words itself. And, pressing on from one movement to another, by way of the "antique style" settings of the movement-titles that were another of Haydn's additions to the choral version, he maximised shifts of key and texture.

So the stern F minor of the fourth slow movement on the words "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" came the more starkly after the melting E major of the third evoking Christ's mother at the Cross. The pungent strangeness of the massed wind sonorities of the interlude was another high point. But perhaps most memorable of all was the exquisitely fine-spun fade-out that Harding, his four soloists and the OAE's distant horns achieved at the end of the seventh slow movement on "Father, into thy hands..." – only to be zapped by the brutal onslaught of the earthquake: the most extreme contrast that even Haydn ever dared.