Customer Reviews

Leonard Bernstein - Mass / Nagano, Hadley, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Having been a huge fan of Mass since I first heard Bernstein's recording when I was in college in the late 80s, I was really excited to see a new recording. While some of the ensemble playing and singing on this recording is technically better it is almost entirely without any kind of soul or emotion. Hadley is okay altough I prefer Alan Titus in the original recording. The real tragedy of this recording is the quality of the many soloists sprinkled throughout the work. They sound like trained choral singers trying to be broadway stars and the effect is awful. Although I don't know this for a fact, after hearing this recording I am convinced that the original recording must have used actual broadway singers/actors--normally not my cup of tea, but far superior to any of the soloists on the Nagano recording. There are also issues with the placement of the various ensembles and balances are disappointing both in terms of sound quality and dramatic tension.

I loved Leonard Bernstein's Mass when I first heard Bernstein's recording of it in the early 1970's. Unfortunately it didn't age will with me: years later I found many of the frequent stylistic juxtapositions forced and the musical-style numbers dated. So I was very interested in Kent Nagano's new recording for Harmonia Mundi.

Nagano's reading is a revelation. I came away with a renewed interest in Bernstein as a composer, if not as a conductor. (As an old music teacher of mine said, don't rely on recordings and performances made by the composer of a score.) Nagano unifies the whole complex work with clean, brisk tempos that have well-defined relationships between sections. Jerry Hadley uses his profound skill to realize the central role of Celebrant as never happened before in Bernstein's recording; in that earlier recording, Alan Titus sings emotionally but variably. Hadley never loses sight of the overall work. His reading of the closing Fraction is amazing.

Instrumental playing is uniformly clean: I heard instrumental textures that I'd never heard in Bernstein's own recording. The choral singing is good, but the English intonation is weak, especially in some of the pop sequences.

If you're interested in revisiting a 1970's period piece, I'd highly recommend this recording.

Having cut my musical eye-teeth on the original cast recording of the Mass, I was so excited to see an updated version of this highly influential theatre work. Unfortunatley, my hopes were dashed by a recording that suffers both artistically and technically. Perhaps it is because Alan Titus' voice is so stuck in my head, but the selection of vocalists shows a refinement that cheapens the performance. The raw quality of Bernstein's statement has been tamed, and the result is flat and lacking in emotion.

This recording also has some fascinating technical issues. On many occasions voices are buried by the orchestra. Soloists come and go with remarkable inconsistency. The recording is muddy in places, and compared to the original cast project leaves much to be desired.

Everyone should own a copy of the Mass, but they should do themselves the favor of buying the original rather than this lukewarm copy.

There are two complete recordings of MASS in the catalog: Bernstein's own reading and this Nagano thing. From the start, the performers are unengaged, bland, and completely ignorant, apparently, of the piece's content. Everything is pretty, refined, and smooth. There is no emotional drama or edge. The soloists are terrible. In Bernstein's reading, the soloists sing the sometimes cynical and sarcastic words of the text with a hard-edged, almost biting tone, reinforcing the hard-hitting words. In Nagano's version, it sounds like everyone is auditioning for the next Webber music. The vocalists are simply uninvolving, especially after one has heard the much more superb Bernstein reading. The celebrant, especially in the 'Gloria,' sounds very artificial while reciting the texts to the official Ordinary.

While cheap, I would encourage you to pass this one up. For a true, groundshaking rendering of the MASS, get Bernstein's own rendering. It will blow you away with its emotional intensity.

We've waited over 30 years for a new recording of Mass and this is what we get? The instrumental playing is good. But this is a theater piece and cannot survive the solo and choral singing in this performance. It sounds under-rehearsed and uncommitted. I agree that Mr. Hadley does a fine job with the Fraction, but I find he misses the mark throughout the rest of the role. Why was a tenor cast in this baritone role anyway? With rare exceptions, the other soloists demonstrate neither the voice nor the spirit to do justice to their music.

We really do need a new recording that builds on the 30 plus years of performance experience with this piece. Here's hoping that Naxos lets Marin Alsop take up the challenge. Her concert performances of this work over the years surpass both of the available recordings. In the meantime, the original recording is unquestionably the one to get.

I was immensely disappointed by this recording. The tempi are entirely too fast and the parts are miscast. The recording itself sounds muddy, and I get better sound off my 40 yr. old turntable with the original LP on it.

"Mass" was considered a major embarrassment when it opened the Kennedy Center in 1971, and critics fell over themselves mocking its jejune lyrics, solipsistic religiosity, and cringing amabition to imitate the success of "Hair." No work from a major composer was more tragically hip. But if Bernstein was quick to leave a painful fiasco behind ("Mass" is the only big piece of his that he never re-recorded), the gaudy music and street-fair theatrics somehow survived. Now a new generation is responding, although I have a sneaking suspicion that Christian fundamentalism may have something to do with this (imagine Bernstein's reaction).

There are three recordings to choose from, and I thought it would be helpful for prospective buyers to know how they difffer.

1971 Bernstein: This is the original cast album, made after the Washington D.C. premiere, with a huge panoply of performers. No ohter recording has assembled so many musicians and singers. For grandiosity and exuberance, Bernsteein's interpretation is unmantched. His critics may have smelled cheese, but the composer flung himself into his own expression wholeheartedly. Alan Titus as the young Celebrant is equally fervent, a hippie-apostle who believes every word, however clunky, put in his mouth. Titus went on to a notable operatic career in Europe but had a knock for the Broadway vernacular that runs through "Mass." Sony's bright, closely-miked sound has a lot of digital glare in its first CD version, but I haven't heard the latest incarnation.

2004 Nagano: As a transplanted American, Kent Nagano brought the true Bernstein idiom to Berlin for this high-energy reading with the Deutsches Sym. Orch. Production values are high, although nowhere close to the original. The recorded sound is very good. This would have been a total success except for Jerry Hadley as the Celebrant. Never much of a vocal actor, Hadley applies the cliches of an operatic tenor, complete with sobs, to a role that above all requires innocence, or at least guilelessness. He's also too old for the part of a post-adolescent searching for faith in a faithlesss world.

2009 Jarvi: The newest recording pulls back from the gaudiness of the score, attempting through a decent restraint to give "Mass" more dignity. In a way this is a half measure. The eye-popping embarrassments that litter Stephen Schwartz's flower-child lyrics (a ripeness of schlock unique in musical history, I think) cannot be erased. But Celebrant Randall Scarlata, the weakest vocally of the three choices, does the best in avoiding excess. His delivery has a Midwestern flatness that's not as cringe-worthy as Broadway glitz. Conductor Kristian Jarvi is competent, as are the various singers and musicians. The American idiom is spotty -- the recording venue was in Austria -- but I like the slimness of the forces involved. A pared-down "Mass" is saved from grandiosity. On the whole, Chandos's up-to-date sound is the best of the three versions.

Which of the three recordings would I choose? It depends on my mood. If I want the full hallucinatory impact, I turn to Bernstein's unvarnished electro-shock enthusiasm. If I feel too embarrassed for that, Jarvi's relative restraint does the best by a score that will always be green eggs and ham.

My recollection of Bernstein's own recording of Mass is that it was an intense but frenzied performance. That of course works for Bernstein, but you can't out-Bernstein Bernstein. I liked Mass when it first appeared and have appreciated it since; I thought numerous adverse critical reviews were little more than cheap pot-shots. After all, who was writing the music, and who was on the sidelines writing criticism? But anyway, I was thrilled to find a modern recording by a major figure such as Kent Nagano. Nagano takes the full measure of the work and does it justice, but the sense of personal frenzy (Bernstein's own ecstasy?) has been replaced by a more coherent whole that I find very satisfying. While it is often interesting to hear composers perform their own works, their performances are not necessarily definitive or even "the best." Kudos to Nagano, Hadley, et al, for bringing this wonderful theater piece to a new generation.

"BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE BERNSTEIN"

"...there are disarmingly beautiful passages in this earnest and boldly eclectic theater piece, like the chorale 'Almighty Father,' with its austerely spacious harmonies, and the bebopping 'Alleluia.' That the work has been championed by contemporary-music dynamos, like the conductor Kent Nagano on his 2003 recording, is a testimony to its strengths."
- THE NEW YORK TIMES (September 11, 208)

This is for sure one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th. century music composed by the genius maestro Leonard Bernstein. Nagano did an excellent job and the sound is simply great!!! If you have the oportunity grab this one and don?t pay attention to the negative reviews, they are just people opinions.