The central attraction of this release is the program: the Magnificat in D major, composed when Felix Mendelssohn was 12, is rarely enough recorded, and the main competitor for the
Yale Schola Cantorum under
Simon Carrington, a disc by German choral specialist
Frieder Bernius, joins it with other Mendelssohn choral works rather than taking the logical step heard here. The young Mendelssohn's Magnificat was strongly shaped by the famous Bach Magnificat in D major, BWV 243, and also by a similar work of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, not included here. It'd be worth recording all three pieces together, for what the Mendelssohn work does is nothing less than help rewrite the history of Bach reception. You can recognize it as Mendelssohn, but it's very much an attempt to grasp Bach's music, and as such it shows how Bach was on Mendelssohn's mind and available to him well before the groundbreaking Bach revivals of his maturity. The piece alternates between contrapuntal choral material and highly ornate solos that Mendelssohn's teacher Zelter apparently turned back to him as too complex, and that provide severe challenges for the student soloists on the present recording. (Bass David Dong-Geun Kim is worth watching, however.) They aren't helped by the murky sonic atmosphere, which tends to swallow up the soloists especially. The Bach Magnificat itself is rendered in the passionate way that makes college choirs attractive, however, and the technically simpler Ave Maria, Op. 23/2, a much less Bachian work, makes a lovely conclusion. For those interested in the Romantic revival of Bach and of Baroque counterpoint in general this will be a useful release.