Somm Recordings celebrates the sublime choral music of Richard Rodney Bennett – best known to a wider audience for his Academy Award-nominated scores to Murder on the Orient Express and Far from the Madding Crowd – with 11 first recordings and a vivid new recording of his choral masterpiece, The Glory and the Dream. Performed by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, directed by Paul Spicer and with dexterous support from organist Nicholas Morris, The Glory and the Dream features 12 varied and vivacious choral pieces composed over more than 50 years. The album’s striking title work sets Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality to music that conjures childhood rapture and adult fears with the utmost finesse and feeling and features a fearsomely complex and challenging organ accompaniment. Dating from 1961, the earliest pieces here are Two Madrigals in which Bennett treats the rich ornamentations of the 17th century to a wholly modern perspective. The most recent work, One Equal Music – a sinewy, austere anthem with a serene ending – was completed in February 2012, just 10 months before the composer’s death at the age of 76. Bennett’s fascination with the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras is also to be found in the elegiac partsong A Contemplation Upon Flowers, the vocal fanfare This Day and Time, a somber meditation on the finality of life and lasting effulgence of Christ’s eternal being, and the simple but affective carol I wonder as I wander. Other seasonal pieces include the early, plainchant-infused The Sorrows of Mary, the gentle ‘hush song’ Lullaby Baby and late, substantial Remember, O thou man, a fervent and heartfelt prayer ending in quiet contemplation. Previous Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir recordings on SOMM have included admired recordings of choral music by Herbert Howells, Samuel Barber and John Joubert, together with partsongs by Ireland, Delius and Stanford.

Following the great success of Gerhard Weinberger’s new and most comprehensive recording ever of Bach’s organ works (German Record Critics Prize, 2009), Mr. Weinberger and CPO now turn to a new edition featuring the organ compositions of Max Reger in performances on selected magnificent organs surviving from Reger’s period. The composer’s overall oeuvre for the organ enabled this instrument to gain new prestige. Vol. 1 contains works offering eloquent testimony to Reger’s veneration of Bach.

The penultimate volume of our edition featuring organ works of the Northern German Baroque focuses on the complete organ works of Jakob Praetorius the Younger and Paul Siefert. Hieronymus Praetorius, the organist at the Church of St. James in Hamburg, is regarded as the most important founding figure in the field of independent Northern German organ artistry. Three of his four songs, Jakob, Johann, and MIchael who already in 1604 had contributed a quarter of the eighty-four cantional settings to the renowned Hamburger Melodeyen Gesangbuch, is said to have developed a special form of fingering and pedal technique making it possible for the organist to assume a very relaxed sitting position and corresponding to his serious, sober, personal disposition. According to the music critic Johann Mattheson, Praetorius's works were "mroe serious" and "more forcefully elaborated" than those of his friend Scheidemann.

This instrument revolutionizes organ building. The main organ in the church of St. Martin in Kassel, consecrated in 2017, already boasts numerous innovations; now the experimental organ, completed in 2021, turns the laws of organ building that have applied for centuries on their head. With a technically highly innovative trick, the traditional Rieger company has succeeded in having the wind flowing into the organ pipe controlled by the touch of the key, stop slide and bellows system. The new sound cosmos of swelling and dying tones that opens up inspires young composers to experiment, documented for the first time on a brand-new Super Audio album that presents both instruments as a convincing unit in overwhelming spatiality. The main organ in St. Martin's is also visually an eye-catcher: the facade is spread across the entire width of the nave, with tufts of artificial hair in front of its labia moving with every breath of wind. With two stops tuned in the middle tone, even the oldest organ music can be heard authentically, while a quarter-tone manual invites composers and audiences alike to embark on a journey of tonal discovery. St. Martin has been known for its innovative spirit for centuries, and Johann Sebastian Bach was drawn to Kassel in 1732 to examine the organ. Bach is both the beginning and the end of Manz's program, which is extraordinary in every respect, with Messiaën's Pentecost Mass at its center. Works by Cabezón, Praetorius, Böhm and de Grigny represent the Renaissance and Baroque, while pieces from Caspar Johannes Walter's composition class represent contemporary, youthful music. Otfried Büsing uses the entire spectrum, from delicately disappearing tones to the mighty quarter-tone cluster: a gigantic rush of sound!

SOMM celebrates Christmas this year with Carols from Chelsea, a delicious offering from the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea under their Director, William Vann. The Royal Hospital, founded in 1682 by Charles II, is the home of the iconic Chelsea Pensioners, who are all retired soldiers of the British Army. The Chapel Choir sings for the Sunday morning Matins service in the Royal Hospital's Wren Chapel during the year, but in December provides the music for carol services and other Christmas-themed events almost every day. This recording showcases some of the Choir's most cherished carol repertoire, alongside solo organ music performed by the Royal Hospital's Organ Scholar, James Orford, and a very special performance with Chelsea Pensioner and George Hatton. Many of the Royal Hospital's carol services begin wtih Franz Gruber's spine-tingling carol Stille Nacht, an especially moving carol to hear in the original German, given it's celebrated performance in the trenches on Christmas Day, 1914. Once in Royal David's City is the first of three carols that are usually sung with the full congregation, opening with the famous solo that captures the mood of Christmas like nothing else.

The mass that Mozart composed in 1779 for the Easter service in Salzburg Cathedral is shrouded in legend. From the very first bar onwards, it exudes the stately tone that would, much later on, earn it the sobriquet "Coronation Mass". Soon after Mozart's death, it became the Viennese court orchestra’s favorite mass for coronation ceremonies.

This new release from BR-KLASSIK is a live recording of a concert, performed on May 21, 2022 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz. That concert of sacred music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart included three other, lesser-known compositions that were also written during his time in Salzburg. Here they are woven in between the short movements of the Coronation Mass, and thus connected to the Mass in a way that might have been required by the practical performance conditions of a Salzburg church service.

In his "Vesperae solennes de Dominica", composed during the same year as the Mass, Mozart fulfilled the Salzburg prince-archbishop's demands for the greatest possible brevity in a tongue-in-cheek manner, by means of various compositional tricks as well as a particularly sonorous score. The album is rounded off by the "Epistle Sonata" for orchestra with obbligato organ in C major, K 329, written to accompany the "Coronation Mass", as well as by the solemn offertory "Alma Dei creatoris" for soloists, choir and orchestra in F major, K 277.

The first-rate cast of soloists consists of Katharina Konradi (soprano), Sophie Harmsen (mezzo-soprano), Steve Davislim (tenor) and Krešimir Stražanac (bass). The soloists and the excellent Bavarian Radio Chorus are accompanied by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, one of the most renowned orchestras in the field of historical and historically informed performance practice. The conductor is Howard Arman.

The version submitted by Howard Arman for the Bavarian Radio Chorus is based on surviving Mozart sources as well as on his colleague Süßmayr's additions; in several places, however, it reaches new conclusions that are implemented with due caution and humble respect for Mozart's magnificent original. Mozart's Requiem is followed by Neukomm's Respond Libera me, Domine – and for musical, liturgical and chronological reasons, the programme begins with Mozart's Vesperae solennes de Confessore KV 339 (1780), composed of psalms from the Old Testament as well as the Magnificat from the Gospel of St Luke and composed for the liturgical festival of a holy confessor. Howard Arman has prepended Mozart’s movements for the festival vespers with antiphons taken from the vespers De Confessore Pontifici (for a confessor who was a bishop) of the Gregorian Liber usualis, and has also composed his own organ intonations to enhance the antiphons.

Although it remained incomplete as Mozart’s last work, the Requiem in D minor (1791) ranks as one of the most important settings of the Latin Mass for the Dead ever written. Immediately after Mozart's all too premature death, his pupil Franz Xaver Süßmayr elaborated a completed version that is still appreciated and regularly performed to this day because of its close proximity to the original – and this despite a number of new adaptations created over the years that sometimes add cautious improvements to the Süßmayr version or instead follow their own lights entirely. – Mozart’s Requiem KV 626 from 1791 is followed by Sigismund von Neukomm's Libera me, Domine, the Respond from the Liturgy of Exequies composed by Neukomm in 1821 as a liturgical completion of Mozart's Requiem for a performance in Rio de Janeiro (the Salzburg composer Neukomm had emigrated to Brazil in 1816).

REVIEW

Howard Arman conducts all pieces with assurance, in a period-informed style. Choral singing complements the accomplished period-informed playing of the thirty-four-strong Akamus on authentic instruments. The world-class Bavarian chorus shows a unanimity of cause, and supplies an inspired sacred sound, ardent, ample and immediate. Arman’s vocal soloists integrate splendidly and convincingly. Amid the emotional drama generated in the performances, the reverential nature of these sacred scores remains fundamental, and is honoured here faithfully.

–MusicWeb International