This recording is part of a cycle of Beethoven symphonies and other large works recorded by the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento, in northeastern Italy, and Austrian conductor
Gustav Kuhn. Some of the recordings have been made in front of a live audience; this one, although it shares an ambiance with the others, contains no crowd noise. It is among the most successful of the group thus far. The real star in Beethoven's extremely iconoclastic late Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, is the Chorus Academy of the Tyrolean Festival, an ensemble that demonstrates the continuing high level of semi-professional choral singing in Austria and Germany. The choral writing is of a piece with that in the Symphony No. 9 finale: it has to be fearlessly attacked, almost belted out, yet without loss of control. These little-known choristers do superbly in such passages as the exuberant opening to the Gloria, the fortissimo antiphonal repetitions of the phrase "Credo, credo" (I believe, I believe), drowning out the subtleties of the Nicene creed, the shocking modal medievalism of the incarnation of Christ, and highly Wagnerian music that follows, including the brutal high entrance of the tenors at "Et resurrexit" (And he was resurrected). It's a standout performance. The soloists, three Austrian and one Chinese, are not quite on this level and don't stand up to the intensity of the choir, although their relative quietness may be a miking problem; in the serenely calm vocal trios dispersed throughout the work to balance the rolling choral power, they sound great. This sprawling, often problematical mass also plays to
Kuhn's strengths, which lie in the areas of balance and clarity; the mighty fugues of this work unroll at a slow but magnficently inevitable paces. The only major negative is the booklet essay, an impressionistic description of the work that inexplicably focuses on a hospice patient who listens to
Alice Cooper and can communicate only with blinks of his eyes. Strongly recommended for those wanting to sample this Austro-Italian series, or for anyone getting acquainted with this arguably most difficult of Beethoven's late masterpieces.