[SACD-R][OF] La Chapelle Royale, Collegium Vocale Gent, Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, Philippe Herreweghe - Mozart: Mass in C minor, Meistermusik K.47 - 1992/2003 (Choral, Orchestral)

In a letter to his father (January 4, 1783) Mozart alludes to the vow he had made “in the depth of his heart…when his wife was still unmarried” to write a work of thanksgiving for the reinstatement of his fiancee Constanze Weber as his wife. He also mentions that the work, of which he had the highest hopes, was already half finished. Mozart had to abandon the work in May. Nonetheless, he was to keep his promise and conducted his Mass – no doubt completed with numbers from – in the Benedictine Abbey Church of Saint Peter’s in Salzburg on October 26, 1783. Constanze, now his wife, sang one of the soprano parts.
Review of the RBCD from Dan Davis at Classics Today
One of the welcome byproducts of the flood of Mozartiana churned out in response to this 250th anniversary year is the reissue of worthy titles, not least among them Philippe Herreweghe’s 1992 Mass in C minor, now available at mid-price in Harmonia Mundi’s Mozart Edition.
Herreweghe covers the Kyrie’s opening with dark strokes, the devotional gloom giving way to a radiant soprano solo, here sung by the pure-voiced Christiane Oelze who discreetly blends the operatic flair of Mozart’s writing with the piety of the text. Oelze is impressive throughout; her intimate singing draws the listener into the music, irresistibly so in the marvelous Et incarnatus est. Jennifer Larmore takes the second soprano part. Her darkish mezzo means that the usually blended ensemble singing of two light-voiced sopranos is replaced here by a strongly contrasted duo. That may disturb some, but I can’t see how anyone can be immune from responding to the beauties of their duet in the Domine Deus or in the trio of the Quoniam.
The men are lesser presences in this work, but they acquit themselves well in their relatively brief parts. The expert period-instrument band plays with mellow timbres, and the chorus superbly negotiates the Handelian fugues of the Cum Sancto Spiritu and the Osanna. They’re powerful too, in the brief but potent Gratias and in the Qui tollis, where Herreweghe elicits a sense of the tragic through his handling of the sharp accents.
The Mass is preceded by the brief Meistermusik with men’s chorus, whose role was dropped when Mozart reworked the piece a few months later into the purely orchestral Masonic Funeral Music. The sound is up to today’s standards. This disc belongs in the small handful of recommended recordings of Mozart’s “Great Mass”.

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