Customer Reviews

Berliner Messe / Mass to St Anthony

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If I rate this disc a 4, it is simply because the BERLINER MASS is not performed with the purity of tone Part's rather severe music demands. Nonetheless, the MASS TO ST. ANTHONY by Lou Harrison for Male and Female Voices, Trumpet, Harp and Strings is a work of great beauty that in itself justifies the price of the disc. The vocal lines emulate Gregorian chant with some of the rhythmic complexities and chromaticism of the later medieval monodists. Like much of Harrison's music, that of his fellows Charles Ives, Henry Cowell and Virgil Thomson and cuch French contemporaries as Francis Poulenc and Maurice Durufle, it seems simpler than it really is. The accompaniment is also deceptively simple, with the harp and double bass punctuating the strings as the latter comment upon and harmonize with the chorus. The trumpet part usually shares the vocal melody, introducing it or playing it in canon against the rest of the ensemble as if it had arrived late from one of Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale cantatas. If forced to provide an analogue, rather than the rigid asceticism of Part, I would choose the chant-based choral works of Maurice Durufle. Like Durufle's QUATRE MOTETS, MISSA CUM JUBILO and REQUIEM, the music is not only pure and direct, but also melodic and subtly rhythmic. The chant serves to illuminate the work from within, providing a warm glow at even the darkest moments. This is the work's third recording following one on Epic, which I have not heard, and another on Vox, neither of which has yet made it to compact disc. The recording on Vox with the Gregg Smith Singers was more intimate than this one using a larger choir and instrumental ensemble. The harp and trumpet parts are both more prominent in the performance on Vox, but both approaches are valid. I would not choose either performance over the other.

Lou Harrison's began work on his Mass To St. Anthony in 1939, initially conceiving it in response to Hitler's invasion of Poland. The work was revised and premiered in 1954, and now stands as a remarkably distinctive manifestation of Harrison's own unique compositional voice and development. The piece seems to reflect both its place of origin and its own genealogy; it opens with a dramatic, martial Kyrie for men's voices, but the language of the piece gradually becomes more pacific in style. The ultimate counterweight to the opening movement is the enchanting, modally ambiguous Agnus Dei, for women's voices in unison. The scoring of the work is wonderfully transparent: strings, harp and trumpet supporting chant-inspired vocal lines that nevertheless occasionally reflect the West Coast jazz idiom with which Harrison was familiar. Unfortunately, the Oregon Repertory Singers also bring a certain West Coast breeziness to their approach; their pitch and rhythmic accuracy suffer accordingly. The performance of Pärt's Berliner Messe is inferior to the Hilliard Ensemble performance on ECM, but props to Koch for giving us an alternate recording.