Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123 (recorded in Oct 2012)
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LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123 (recorded in Oct 2012)
Lucy Crowe, Jennifer Johnston, James Gilchrist, Matthew Rose / Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique & Monteverdi Choir, Sir John Eliot Gardiner
[ Soli Deo Gloria / CD ]
Release Date: Thursday 20 February 2014
This item is currently out of stock. It may take 6 or more weeks to obtain from when you place your order as this is a specialist product.
"A daringly coloured account, exuberant physicality... There was hardly a passage that did not show the result of Gardiner's hallmark intelligence and audacity" - The Guardian *****
"Nothing short of rapid-fire choral entries will do, and the Monteverdi sopranos duly shone in their ecstatic embrace of the stratosphere -The Financial Times *****
This album was recorded live at the Barbican in 2012. It features soloists Lucy Crowe (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo), James Gilchrist (tenor), Matthew Rose (bass). Sir John Eliot Gardiner offers a daring reading of this piece. The ORR's performance on period instruments is virtuosic and colourful; the Monteverdi Choir contributes arresting chorus parts. Composed "from the heart", Beethoven's epic Mass has been described a statement of highly personal religious faith. It is rarely heard in concert due to the large forces required and the exacting demand it places on all performers.
The album is packaged in a digipack and contains a 36-page booklet with original notes by BBC presenter and music journalist Stephen Johnson.
"Gardiner's intensity of phrasing - speed never the enemy of expression - combines with rapid-fire choral entries and a radiant quartet of soloists to create an incandescent performance" Financial Times, 7th December 2013 ****
"Roger Montgomery plays with exemplary nobility and assurance on the natural horn, making fiendish "stopped" notes sound as easy as sleigh bells." The Times, 7th December 2013 *****
"Gardiner's live 2012 recording from the Barbican is faster and even more radical than his 1990 studio recording, with punchier choral articulation. But it, too, captures the desperate urgency and almost unbearable emotional intensity of this supreme work" Sunday Times, 15th December 2013
"the briskness never undermines the work's moments of transcendent beauty or near-operatic theatricality - the Dona Nobis Pacem has a cataclysmic climax" The Guardian, 2nd January 2014 ****
"I think that the 2012 reading transcends even the 1989 recording. For a start the orchestral playing is excellent...The contribution of the Monteverdi Choir is simply magnifice...The members of the solo quartet are individually excellent and also make a fine team...a powerful and superbly executed account of Beethoven's choral masterpiece." MusicWeb International, 22nd January 2014
"Such is the visceral intensity of the music-making, a certain girding of the loins may be required before a second hearing, but isn't that precisely how it should be with a work of this power and magnitude?" Editor's Choice Gramophone Magazine, February 2014
