Challenges even the best - a bargain alternative to Trevor Pinnock.

Naxos already had a decent recording of the ‘Nelson’ Mass (8.554416, with the ‘Little Organ’ Mass, Hob.XXII/7) on which soloists, the Hungarian Radio Chorus and the Nikolaus Esterházy Sinfonia were conducted by Béla Drahos. The new recording, Volume 3 of the Naxos series of the Haydn Masses, is also available in an 8-CD.

The Nikolaimesse, recorded in 2002, gets the new recording off to a very good start. The music is lighter, less vintage Haydn than its more familiar companion, with mainly brisk tempi much in the manner of the short early Masses which Mozart composed for his Salzburg patron Archbishop Coloredo. It also receives a fine performance and recording. The soloists don’t merit a listing on the rear insert, but they are named inside the booklet, as they deserve to be. If I select Ann Hoyt, the soprano, for special praise, that should not be at the expense of the others.

To be honest, I had not expected much from this CD - I hadn’t heard of any of the performers and I’d forgotten the warm reception which the complete box had received - but the performance of the Nikolaimesse alone makes it worth the modest price. All concerned convince me that this early work is at least the equal of any of Mozart’s Masses, with the exception of the Coronation (K317) the ‘Great’ Mass (K427)and, of course, the Requiem (K626).

The ‘Nelson’ Mass is, I think, at least the equal of the three best Mozart Masses. I shall continue to give it that name as a kind of shorthand, though it has very little to do with Lord Nelson: Haydn nicknames have a habit of sticking even when they are inappropriate - there is at least enough evidence to doubt that it was at a performance of Symphony No.96 that the heavy chandelier narrowly missed causing serious injury, yet the name ‘Miracle’ continues to be attached to that work. Haydn himself called it Missa in angustiis, Mass in straitened times, but it’s easier and shorter to continue to call it the ‘Nelson’.

The opening Kyrie announces that this is a more serious work than the Nikolaimesse. As Jennifer More Glagov notes in the excellent booklet, the lack of wind players - the Prince had just dismissed them as an economy measure - apart from three (specially hired?) trumpets gives the work an undeniably martial tone.

The performers again give an excellent account of themselves. Only Ann Hoyt remains from the earlier line-up and continues to sing impressively - my wife came in as I was listening and was very surprised to discover that this was the voice of a singer whom neither she nor I had heard before. Naxos and others please note, we want to hear more of her. The other soloists and the choir also step up to the plate and the recording, though thicker than for the earlier work, recorded five years earlier, is more than adequate. The last semi-professional performance of the ‘Nelson’ that I heard was spoiled by a soprano who out-sang everyone else, but that is certainly not the case here. I understand that all the soloists are members of the Trinity Choir, which must make it a formidable place for the musically inclined to worship.

John Sheppard (hereafter JS) complained of Burdick’s habit of slowing at certain points, but some of these are traditional. In the Creed, for example, the slowing at the end of track 16 on the words descendit de cælis prepares for the more marked traditional emphasis on et incarnatus est in the next section, where it used to be expected that all would kneel or bow deeply. In any case, JS soon began to be as untroubled by this practice as I was.

William Hedley (hereafter WH) commented on the reverberant acoustic of the Trinity Church but I really was not troubled by this - different audio systems react differently to reverberant recordings. Nor was I really troubled by the other detailed criticisms which he makes. Rather than repeat these here, I refer you to his review. Whilst I admit the validity of just about all of them, I cannot consider them a serious handicap to an overall recommendation.

WH is more than a little hard on the diction - the syllables are frequently chopped up in the wrong places, but the demise of Latin in the school curriculum makes it almost inevitable that a choir’s familiarity with that language can no more be taken for granted than a knowledge of Japanese. (Actually, the latter is a more frequent visitor to the modern UK secondary curriculum). Haydn would have expected to hear the harder Austro-Germanic pronunciation of Latin, with hard ‘g’ in virginis, and ‘c’ in crucifixus, for example; I’m pleased to report that all concerned here take the softer Italianate course.

JS raises the possibility that the set as a whole is superior even to Hickox (Chandos CHAN0599, also available separately) or Guest (Argo/Decca). I’m not quite sure that I would go that far, but I was impressed enough by the single CD under consideration to wish to sample more of the set via the Naxos Music Library.

I’ve already praised the quality of the Naxos notes. One small complaint concerns the absence of texts, but the Tridentine Latin Mass is pretty well known and the texts and translations are available online, as indicated above: they can be yours even without buying the CD.

Overall, I think that WH is right to prefer John Eliot Gardiner (Philips 470 2862, with the Theresienmesse) and Trevor Pinnock (DG Archiv 423 0972, with the Te Deum). I recommended the Pinnock version of the ‘Nelson’ Mass as Download of the Month in my May 2009 Download Roundup) and thoroughly agree with WH that it offers a life-enhancing experience, but I can’t imagine purchasers of the present CD being disappointed with J Owen Burdick’s performances. Having heard the recording right through once, I couldn’t wait to hear it all again, instead of taking the usual time out to gather my impressions. Go for Pinnock for the best - even at full price and rather short value - but the new Naxos makes a very fine and less expensive alternative.

-- Brian Wilson, MusicWeb International

Recorded ‘as live’ in October 2006 following its performance at The Sixteen’s opening concert as Associate Artists of Southbank Centre, Brahms’ German Requiem one of the great choral masterpieces of all time. Brahms himself made a piano transcription of the orchestral parts of his magnificent Requiem. The arrangement for two players allows a degree of intimacy, precision and contrapuntal clarity that cannot be achieved in the orchestral version; indeed, at times one is reminded of the Liebeslieder-Walzer op. 52. In 1871 this version was given its English première conducted by Brahms’s friend Julius Stockhausen.  It is appropriate therefore that the piano used on this recording is a Bösendorfer of 1872 thus allowing us to experience the sort of sound Brahms himself would have heard.

Frank Martin was arguably Switzerland’s greatest composer.  His shimmering Mass for Double Choir, completed in 1926 as ‘an affair between God and himself’, is one of the finest settings of the 20th century, yet it had to wait forty-one years to be shared with others in its first performance. This collection of his choral music also includes his cantata for Switzerland’s National Day and the Ode to Music, along with some charming part-songs. Eclectic and technically superb these pieces display a style that is serenely individual.

Recorded in January 2014 in the grand acoustical environment of St. Joseph Cathedral in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, by Grammy Award-winning producer Blanton Alspaugh of Soundmirror, this recording once again testifies the stature of South Dakota Chorale as a first-rate ensemble that delivers no less than sublime choral performances.

Sacred Songs of Life and Love features some of the most beautiful works in contemporary Scandinavian and Baltic choral music, including Arvo Pärt’s Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen, selections from Kunt Nystedt’s Prayers of Kierkegaard, Sven-David Sandström’s Four Songs of Love and Algirdas Martinaitis’ Alleluia.

Review:

The South Dakota Chorale are more than well suited to this full-bodied repertoire. They address the common lyricism of the music through a warmth of sound and sonority that is not only notably varied in tone and color but which is all but perfect in blend, ensemble and intonation.

– Gramophone

Padilla is symbolic of an age. One of the most important composers of the ‘New World’, Padilla was a native of Spain who emigrated to Mexico at a time when the church had money as well as a great appreciation of art in the service of the church. Streams of Tears reflects not only the penitential nature of this music but also a period in history know as the ‘Siglo de Oro’ when Spain and Portugal were masters of the great ocean and in the process of discovering and developing new lands in the Americas. The music of the period is as varied as it is distinctive, with a harmonic richness and colour that is found nowhere else.

The sombre colours of Schütz’s moving funeral music are finely brought out in this collection, which also includes several varied smaller settings of standard liturgical texts. The resonant acoustic enhances the inventiveness of the writing.
Performance: 5 (out of 5); Sound: 5 (out of 5)

-- George Hall, BBC Music Magazine

The woodcarvings of Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460-1531) represent the final and fullest flowering of the Gothic style in Germany. In the artistic fever of the Renaissance his work was swiftly forgotten, but after centuries of neglect his reputation is now firmly restored. On this CD, the world of Riemenschneider is given a musical perspective with a carefully chosen selection of pieces by the finest composers of his time. Inside, Hugh Griffith provides explanatory notes on his life and musical environment.

Exceptionally elegant performances from a first rate band of musicians.

Although it is for his instrumental music, primarily symphonies, string quartets and works for solo piano that Josef Haydn is most known, he was quite given to writing for voices and left behind a sizeable output of operas, twelve authenticated masses and numerous other settings of sacred texts for choir, soloists and orchestra. This program gives us his first and last words in the mass genre, one by an exuberant boy of seventeen the other by a tired and weary old man, although one could never discern the composer’s fatigue by listening to the music.

The Missa Brevis in F is a little gem of economy, with Haydn sailing through the wordy Credo in under three minutes, a feat he accomplished by stacking phrases of the text on top of one another and distributing them throughout the voice parts. The unusual scoring for only two solo voices, both sopranos might have been a vehicle for he and his brother Michael, though it does stretch belief a bit to think of a seventeen year old with an unchanged voice.

The Harmoniemesse is one of Haydn’s final works, written for the birthday celebrations of the Esterhazy Princess in 1802. The composer soon took his leave of the Esterhazy family after decades of service and although he lived another seven years, he did little composing after this period. There is no evidence in this joyful and exuberant mass that Haydn was at all ill. In fact, his later masses have been criticized over the years for their joyous optimism, and sometimes overly upbeat settings of the more reflective and serious parts of the texts. Be that as it may, this is a masterpiece, beautifully augmented by the full complement of wind instruments that give the mass its nickname of “harmonie.”

These are performances of divinely understated elegance. Singing from the choir is dead in tune and beautifully balanced. Phrases are splendidly shaped and tempo choices are spot on. The Trinity Choir is full of fine soloists, and there is some magnificent singing from sopranos Ann Hoyt and Julie Liston is the Missa Brevis. The Rebel Baroque Orchestra is a tight band of precision players. The clarity of their playing, especially in fast passages is without flaw. The one and only defect in this production is the lack of texts and translations in the booklet. The program notes are informative and interesting and not loaded with blow by blow descriptions of the music.

These are performances of almost text-book perfection and will be a delight to any lover of choral music. With really nothing to criticize, I can say nothing more but go add this fine recording to your library.

-- Kevin Sutton, MusicWeb International

Copied in 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral, which had just been refounded as a secular cathedral following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monastic cathedrals, the Peterhouse partbooks contain seventy-two works for five voices in the major liturgical forms of the day-principally Mass, Magnificat, and votive antiphon. Despite the enormous importance of this source to music history and the extremely high quality of much of the music contained in it, it has received short shrift from performers and musicologists alike, owing to the fact that the tenor partbook, along with a portion of the treble, has been missing for centuries. This has prevented singers from performing the fifty pieces in the partbooks that survive complete in no other source-until recently, that is. Blue Heron's performances of the incomplete Peterhouse music rely on reconstructions by the English musicologist Nick Sandon, who over the course of his career has devoted much of his creative energies to the project. Sandon completed his dissertation on the partbooks in 1983, including reconstructions of almost all of the incomplete music. Over the nearly three decades since, he has been refining and revising his completions and issuing them in Antico Edition.

Blue Heron has made the Peterhouse repertoire a specialty ever since its first concerts in 1999, in which the ensemble performed Aston's Ave Maria dive matris Anne, the opening track of the new disc. It is safe to say that Blue Heron has sung more of Nick Sandon's tenor lines than any other ensemble in North America, and never in ten years has any one in the group felt that a note he composed felt wrong. His quite amazing accomplishment is to have recreated a musical line that is utterly idiomatic, not merely to the general language of English music in the early sixteenth century, but to the local dialect and accent of one composer and, even more specifically, to that one composer's voice as heard in one piece in all its particularity. We-and Aston and Jones and Mason and all the other Peterhouse composers-owe him grateful thanks for restoring this marvelous music to us in singable form.

The CD booklet includes extensive notes by Nick Sandon on the Peterhouse partbooks, their place in history, and the process of restoring the missing music, as well detailed information concerning historical performance practice by Scott Metcalfe.