Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123

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it's not difficult to understand why Gardiner wanted this particular performance perpetuated: fine as the Archiv version is, the new one has an electricity of a kind that's hard to generate under... — BBC Music Magazine, April 2014, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 11th Nov 2013
Catalogue No: SDG718
Label: SDG
Length: 70 minutes

Gramophone Magazine

February 2014

Editor's Choice
Gramophone Awards

2014

Finalist - Choral
International Classical Music Awards

2015

Winner - Choral Works

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Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123

Work length1:10:04

$16.00

$20.60

$28.00

Lucy Crowe (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo-soprano), James Gilchrist (tenor), Matthew Rose (bass)
Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
Sir John Eliot Gardiner
Recorded: 17 October 2012
Recording Venue: Barbican Hall, London

Kyrie

Track length8:18

$2.00

$2.60

$3.50

Gloria

Track length15:33

$4.00

$5.15

$7.00

Credo

Track length17:53

$4.00

$5.15

$7.00

Sanctus

Track length14:45

$3.00

$3.85

$5.25

Agnus Dei

Track length13:35

$3.00

$3.85

$5.25

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“Performed to perfection and brought into new, terrifying life” – The Times *****

“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.

Reviews

April 2014

it's not difficult to understand why Gardiner wanted this particular performance perpetuated: fine as the Archiv version is, the new one has an electricity of a kind that's hard to generate under studio conditions.

7th December 2013

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

February 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?

March 2014

the whole performance is in almost all respects a triumph. The choir and orchestra are superbly drilled, and apart from occasional sharpness in some of the soloists' parts they too are first-rate.

22nd 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 magnificent...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.

15th 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

2nd January 2014

the briskness never undermines the work's moments of transcendent beauty or near-operatic theatricality – the Dona Nobis Pacem has a cataclysmic climax

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.

Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123

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