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Reviewer:
Peter Quantrill
The filming of this B minor Mass operates under some confusion as to whether the music is there to illustrate the St Laurence Church of Nuremburg or vice versa. Showing the church roof and then a slow credit roll is no way to treat the grand opening statement of the Kyrie, and the camera looks heavenwards just when all voices and instruments are going hell for leather at the climax of the ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’. Musical direction is handled by Peter Dijkstra, artistic director of the Bavarian Radio Choir until last year, and it’s a choirmaster’s sort of performance, bouncily articulated, disciplined and well-mannered to a fault, with the first-class members of Concerto Köln left largely to sleepwalk through some of the most vital counterpoint ever conceived by mind of man. Even the trumpets are subtle. The ‘Osanna’ fugue has rarely sounded so relaxed, or so inconsequential. The audio production is excellent, lending equal weight to strands of instrumental and choral argument so that the vital moving part of the violas in the ‘Qui tollis’ cuts through the texture. The choir is slimmed down from its usual Resurrection Symphony-size to eight or so voices to a part, with an all-female alto section that has no trouble asserting itself. Its members sing with professionally polished regard to each others’ parts, but then so did their counterparts in 1994, when they were moulded and raised to inspiration by the considerably more engaged direction of Carlo Maria Giulini (Sony Classical, 3/95). Within the constraints of an overall lack of ambition, the soloists all acquit themselves well. The adaptable Anke Vondung sings both ‘Laudamus te’ and ‘Qui sedes’, but her voice expands more gratefully into the lower register of ‘Et in unum Dominum’ and especially the ‘Agnus Dei’, in a rare and welcome passage of sustained pathos. The closing ‘Dona nobis’ returns to business as usual. |
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