Bruckner’s Mass in F Minor (1868) marks a decisive transition in the style of the composer, a Viennese masterpiece that bears many of the earmarks of his middle (symphonic) period, especially his tendency to idiosyncratic repetition and the free intermingling of Wagnerian harmony and baroque musical procedures. Even beyond the academic assimilation of musical styles, Bruckner exerts his own–often obsessive or compulsive–personality into the writing, applying to Palestrina or plainchant his own massive sonic textures, clearly derived from organ sonorities. Against periods of thick, angst-laden harmonies there come moments of modal, other-worldly tranquility, as in the Sanctus; but here, too, the music can explode suddenly in the Osanna in excelsis section. The Benedictus lulls us with choral groups which often sound like Mendelssohn, only more angularly modal, like Faure. The instrumental writing for the woodwinds and horns rings pantheistic, as if the roof of the cathedral were a cloudless sky.
The C Major Gloria offers some rarified moments for the novitiate to Bruckner’s liturgical style: it opens with a literal plainchant over an urgent rhythmic figure that churns aggressively. The martial tenor of the piece thickens into something like Franck and the Dies Irae from the Mozart Requiem, trumpets ablaze. A chromatic line extends its way through the ferment to the Qui tollis, in which Herreweghe’s sopranos achieve an angelic, lachrymose grandeur. The string writing becomes typically Brucknerian, thickly ostinato. The miserere nobis is sung a cappella, only to yield to massive, martial, cumulus clouds. The canons on Gloria Dei patris chug in processionals at once exalted and earthbound. If the Credo pays homage to Beethoven of the Missa Solemnis, the Agnus Dei at least glances to the operatic Verdi in its juxtaposition of solo, vocal quartet writing and the periods of chromatically swooping, affecting part-writing for the full chorus. Of the individual singers in this recording, Swedish soprano Ingela Bohlin stands out as a voice to follow for its fluent transparency in even the highest regions of aerial virtuosity.
A conscientious, beautifully modulated and well-recorded effort in all respects.
— Gary Lemco
