Biber: Requiem; Mass

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber's "comeback" was established in the 1950s through the revival of his Mystery Sonatas. Nevertheless, as the twenty-first century opens Biber's sacred choral music, the largest, most advanced and difficult choral music of its era, is swiftly gaining ground. In Archiv Produktion's Biber: Requiem & Missa, Paul McCreesh leads the Gabrieli Consort and Players through the second recording made in 15 years of Biber's Requiem ex F con terze minore, a huge piece in 15 parts, and the first recording ever made of Biber's Missa ex B à 6. Many sources identify the latter work as being partly lost, but the mass presented here has all of the necessary liturgical components and seems complete.
Intriguingly conceived as "A Requiem for Biber," this program attempts to give an idea of what Biber's own funeral service may have been like, even though it is barely known when he died, let alone having any account of this service. McCreesh has painstakingly filled in all of the liturgical holes, borrowing pieces from Biber's contemporaries Muffat, Schmelzer, Lassus, and the more obscure Abraham Megerle and fitting them together with the Biber mass movements, like pieces in a puzzle, to create a complete funeral service for the composer.
Unfortunately, McCreesh takes the music at a plodding, uninteresting tempo. While it is a funeral service, this does not mean the music has to drag, and drag it does. The quality of the recording, made at the Tonbridge School Chapel in Kent, is for some reason far below the usual standards for Archiv. The notes go into some detail on the measures taken in terms of restringing and retuning the violins and violas to ensure that Biber's fiddle parts lay comfortably on the strings. Yet in the finished recordings, the strings are all but inaudible, as the organ overbalances them. The same fate is also in store for the singers, much of the time. Alas, Biber is dead -- and so is this music.
While the idea, editorial principles, and performance practices here are all scrupulously sound, the dull performance and indifferent recording makes Biber: Requiem & Missa somewhat less than an attractive proposition, despite adding a new work to Biber's ever-growing recorded canon.