Customer Reviews

Martin: Mass, Passacaille; Pizzetti: Requiem / O'Donnell, Westminster Cathedral Choir

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Do not listen to this CD while attempting to drive, cook, run the bath water etc. You will crash your car, burn your food and flood your house because this music is so captivating. I tend to find 20th century music interesting but not particularly moving (unless gritting your teeth through harmonically bizarre and hair-raising dissonance counts as being moved). These peices, quite obviously modern but paying homage to a variety of past musical styles, are both astonishingly touching and intellectually challenging. The level of concentration needed to sing this music is incredible, yet the choir simply soars through it. (Incidentally, for those of you fearing the typical English trebel overload with a muddle of voices underneath, close inspection of the CD notes reveals that the choir has 4 boy altos AND 4 countertenors which makes for a much better balance than most English cathedral choirs: you can actually hear 8 parts distinctly when they claim there are 8 parts to be heard.) If you like modern choral music, you'll like this CD. If 20th century choral music makes you wish you were hearing a cat fight instead, you will still like this music. Please get this CD; it will make you think about music, ancient and modern, in a whole new light.

Frank Martin's Mass is one of the undiscovered gems of the 20th century choral repertoire. Written when Martin was 32, this work is a deeply felt spiritual testament by an underated composer. The work has one foot in the Renaissance and one foot in the modern world. Much of the melodic material is modal in character. The harmonies are decidedly chromatic, but chromatic in a Faure/Durufle sort of way. And the rhythmic vitality of the Gloria is astounding. This is a difficult but rewarding work and deserving of much more attention.

The remainder of the disc is filled with an organ piece by Martin in his more mature contemporary style and is rounded out by two piece by the Italian composer Pizzetti. Though the Pizzetti pieces are not as profoundly felt as the Martin Mass, they are quite beautiful and deserve a hearing.

I have listened to this recording perhaps 30 times now, and if the trebles are terribly out of tune I don't hear it. Perhaps the recording engineer decided to forgo the autotune feature which has promoted the unrealistic expectation of scientifically precise intonation on many modern choral recordings. If so, I applaud him or her. This choir sounds beautiful and natural...not clinical. I agree with one of the other reviewers in saying that there is a lack of fundemental in the recording, but I'm not sure if highly chromatic works are always well served by so much bass partial. Tends to muddy the sound.

All in all, a great disc with music that everyone should hear.

Everything positive that you have heard or read about this recording is absolutely true! It deserved its prestigious Gramophone award and it deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. I am an experienced choral singer and can attest to the superb quality of the singing you will find here -- it's all accurate and oh-so beautiful. I certainly cannot think of any choral group that can out-perform Westminster Cathedral Choir as they are on this recording!

My personal CD collection is made up of about 250 choral music recordings of all types (including around 60 cathedral/collegiate choir recordings), and this one immediately took its rightful place as one of my favorite CDs, of any type, period. The Martin mass is a sublime piece of music, with soul-stirring moments of reverence, prayerfulness, sadness, and joy. It is a challenging work and must have been quite difficult to sing - but rest assured, Westminster Cathedral Choir was very up to the task. I had heard the work before on another recording (Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford recorded it nicely in 1989), but this rendition greatly overshadowed that one and brought new life into the music. The experience when I first put it on was enough to keep me spell-bound for several hours afterward - and this from someone who is not always fond of 20th century choral music. The singing is so hauntingly precise and pure that I wonder what kind of magic James O'Donnell was practicing when this recording was made. The Pizzetti is a little less emotionally stirring but also very lovely and, of course, beautifully sung.

The aesthetic power of these two gorgeous choral works combined with the sheer excellence of the choir's singing make this recording one of the finest - if not THE finest - cathedral choir performances you are ever likely to hear. Do buy this CD -- you are in for a musical treat to be savored for many years to come.

Everything positive that you have heard or read about this recording is absolutely true! It deserved its prestigious Gramophone award and it deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. ... I am an experienced choral singer and can attest to the superb quality of the singing you will find here -- it's all accurate and oh-so beautiful. ...

My personal CD collection is made up of hundreds of recordings of all types (including numerous choral CDs), and this one immediately took its rightful place as one of my favorite CDs of any genre, period. The Martin mass is a sublime piece of music, with soul-stirring moments of reverence, prayerfulness, sadness, and joy. It is a challenging work and must have been quite difficult to sing - but rest assured, Westminster Cathedral Choir was very up to the task. I had heard the work before on another recording (Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford recorded it nicely in 1989), but this rendition greatly overshadowed that one and brought new life into the music. The experience when I first put it on was enough to keep me spell-bound for several hours afterward - and this from someone who is not always fond of 20th century choral music. The singing is so hauntingly precise and pure that I wonder what kind of magic James O'Donnell was practicing when this recording was made. And above all, the music itself is among the most beautiful I have ever heard.

The Pizzetti is not quite as emotionally stirring as the Martin but also very interesting, lovely and, of course, beautifully sung.

The aesthetic power of these two gorgeous choral works combined with the sheer excellence of the choir's singing make this recording one of the finest - if not THE finest - cathedral choir performances you are ever likely to hear. Do buy this CD -- you are in for a musical treat to be savored for many years to come.

The finest cathedral choir in the UK, the Choir of Westminster Cathedral has never sounded better than it did during the 1990s under its then Master of Music, James O'Donnell, and does now during the 2000s under its present Master of Music, Martin Baker. The Westminster Cathedral Choir's outstanding recording of Frank Martin's Mass for double choir and Ildebrando Pizzetti's Messa di Requiem won Gramophone Awards for "Best Choral Recording of the Year" and "Record of the Year" in 1998. And deservedly so.

This was Gramophone's disc of the year in 1998, and the performances and music are indeed breathtaking (regardless of whether you think the award was, perhaps, a little surprising). Martin's Mass is one of the most sublime and inspired creations in his oeuvre, and indeed in the whole history of Western music. It was composed in 1922 (the Agnus Dei in 1926) and was apparently never intended for public performance. Harmonically it is exploratory, but not using any form of twelve-tone system, not even in the personal manner of Martin's later and more famous compositions. The Westminster Cathedral Choir under James O'Donnell gives a glorious and fervently energetic but profound performance, and the music does in my mind benefit from using boys' rather than women's voices. This is, in short, as moving and inspiring as musical experiences get - the fine Passacaille is a nice coupling as well.

Pizzetti's Messa di Requiem was composed the same year as Martin's mass and is a serene and lyrical work - not quite on the level of Martin's, but still immensely rewarding, and again the performances are stunning, lush but transparent and almost radiant. The De profundis is a lesser work but still a fine conclusion to this marvelous disc. Sound quality is superb as well, truly capturing the freshness, depth and ambience of the performances, and this is, in short, an obligatory acquisition.

For a cappella music, there are now two "ultimate choral" albums: Laurence Equilbey's "Accentus Transcriptions," also available on Amazon, and this release. It'd be tough to have to choose between the two albums -- thank goodness I don't have to.

1922 was apparently a very good year for a cappella mass writing. Swiss composer Frank Martin's reputedly Calvinistic Mass hails from that year (the Agnus Dei notwithstanding), as does Pizzetti's Catholic Requiem Mass. The Martin work is beautiful, powerful, and reaches for the heavens. The Pizzetti work is also a very strong work, coming from a different stylistic universe. The performances are astonishing -- note, for just one example among many, the ending of the Dies Irae movement in the Pizzetti. It just doesn't seem possible that those measures are being sung by human beings, the carefully-balanced texture is so eerily ethereal and unexpected -- you're thinking, "Did instruments join the singers?" even though you know that's not the case.

There are other 20th century a cappella masses of note (Paul Hindemith's 1963 Mass, his very last work, as well as R. Scott Sandmeier's 1982 Mass), but none performed and recorded so sumptuously as these two on the Hyperion label. One pays a premium for Hyperion recordings of up to 50%, which would be enough to raise an eyebrow if you weren't accorded the highest quality product in return. So far, Hyperion hasn't disappointed me yet: the Holst Choral Symphony and complete Saint-Saens piano concertos are both top-notch productions, and THIS recording of the Martin & Pizzetti works is no exception.

There are two non-Mass works on this disc as well: a passacaglia for organ by Martin, and a brief choral work by Pizzetti based on Psalm 130, "De Profundis." Pizzetti and Malipiero simultaneously wrote works based on Psalm 130 to commemorate their reconciliation after a Pizzetti-initiated spat. As for the passacaglia, it follows the great Bach C Minor passacaglia 3/4-time pattern, but uses 11 of the 12 chromatic pitches to craft the theme (which is notated in the CD booklet for reference). Programming an album is a dicey thing: how do you keep things interesting? Interposing the organ work between choral numbers seems to make superficial sense, but I came away thinking the organ piece really didn't fit with the rest of the album. Perhaps I'm influenced by the purity exemplified by the Accentus recording, the other contender for "ultimate a capella choral album."

Heart-wrenching beauty and extreme delicacy are the hallmarks of Frank Martin's nearly-undiscovered Mass for double choir. It is also one of the most difficult that an English Cathedral Choir could take on. Westminster Cathedral Choir under James O'Donnell (now at Westminster Abbey) not only take it on, they set the standard by which all future performances and recordings must be judged. So virtuosic is this rendition, it will have you hanging on every note- you will feel joy and sorrow all at once, and it may make you weep more than once. Mr O'Donnell demonstrates his prowess as an organist in his performance of Martin's "Passacaille", a much-different work than the Mass which nonetheless makes for rewarding listening especially as an introduction to twentieth-century organ music and serialist composition. And for the closing half of the programme, the choir sings two works by another great but seldom-heard-of composer, Ildebrando Pizzetti, whose "Requiem" and "De Profundis" hark back to the rich choral textures of the Italian Renaissance whilst striking a comtemporary note. In short, this CD speaks for itself. It is not often that a choral work wins the Gramophone Record of the Year Award- but it is not hard to see why this did.

This CD won Gramophone magazine's award for Classical Record of the Year for 1998.

After reading the positive reviews of this CD, I have to voice a bit of disappointment in this recording of Martin's Mass.

The piece is well-conducted, and O'Donnell does a fine job both interpretively and technically, in apparently having trained some very young-sounding voices to match vowels and achieve as much blend as possible.

However, the trebles - often the most prominent part in the Mass - seem to suffer some control problems, both in terms of vocal attack and tuning, where they tend to sharp. This may not be noticeable to some listeners, but experienced ears may find this imprecision painful. The choir is by no means sloppy, but there are certainly more refined all-male English choruses out there.

The recording quality, though, is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this CD. Low frequencies are not captured well, and as a result the entire performance seems to lack warmth and foundation. Compared to most a cappella choral recordings, it sounds as if only the upper partials of the bass parts are audible. As a result, the contrast between the upper-parts-only, texturally "ethereal" sections of the Mass and the warmer, richer sonorities of many passages (such as "passus et sepultus est" in the Credo and the entire Agnus Dei) is lost, and the entire recording has a somewhat "tin-can" sound to it.

Being present at a live perfomance of this, where these problems may have been less noticeable, would probably have been a very pleasing experience. Given the problems on the CD, though, I would suggest first looking for another recording of the Martin Mass.