MOZART: Great Mass in C Minor, K. 427 – Maria Stader, soprano/Hertha Topper. mezzo-soprano/Ernst Haefliger, tenor/Ivan Sardi, bass/ St. Hedwig’s Choir/RSO Berlin/Ferenc Fricsay
Tahra TAH 690, 58:48 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
Ferenc Fricsay (1914-1963) staged this live performance (29 September 1959) of Mozart’s Great Mass as a public “full dress rehearsal” for his commercial inscription that DGG made the next day. The magnificent work, composed 1782-17883 for an unusual vocal quartet–two sopranos, tenor, and bass–has been adjusted to include Austrian contralto Hertha Topper, noted for realization of Judith in Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Topper and the glorious Maria Stader will combine in plastic harmony for the Domine deus in the Great Mass, where the fusion of dark and light achieves Mozart’s divine symbolism of Father and Son, or the Manichean duality resolved by Promethean fire.
Maria Stader shines immediately in the Laudamus te, her voice all crystal optimism, the melismas ascending to some realm beyond the physical aether. Her renderings of Christe eleison combine both supplication and faithful joy. Fricsay’s color for Mozart always retains the dark luminosity of the low woodwinds and the secondary strings. The coloratura writing reflects not only the Handelian opera influence, but it moves with sweeping vitality to heights rarely matched by the composer himself, unless we include the instrumental writing from the Jupiter Symphony. We can relish Mozart’s massive vocal style in the Credo in Unum Deum section, then followed by Stader’s awesome meditation Et incarnates est, the most extended section of the Mass. A wind serenade opens the episode, followed by strings, flutes, oboe, bassoon, and stratospheric Stader, who suffers a small pitch error in the course of a tenderly transparent rendition.
The power of the Gratias, for instance, subsumes the intensity of Mozart’s more colossal Masonic scores; yet within the muscular progression we can hear the ambitions of later Romantic successors–like Schumann–in their respective devotional music. The hair-raising opening of the Qui tollis will transport us to the fugal writing Mozart achieved in his K. 546, the Adagio and Fugue that set for Tchaikovsky the very essence of counterpoint technique. We must certainly credit the ample preparation given the St. Hedwig’s Choir, likely by Karl Forster, that now responds so deeply to Fricsay’s idiosyncratic, Romantic style, as in the short but massive Jesu Christe movement, which connects directly into the mighty Cum Sancto Spiritu.
The male voices, too, contribute to the emotional success of Fricsay’s potent rendition: Ernst Haefliger (1919-2007), a constant in the many performances of the evangelist in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion under Richter or Lehmann, shines in the Quoniam section, a relatively brief lyrical march-trio in which he joins his two female counterparts. The upward scales invoke a vision of Paradiso in counterpoint. Hungarian bass Ivan Sardi (b. 1930), who sang Masetto under Fricsay for Fischer-Dieskau’s Don Giovanni, adds a firm foundation to the vocal quartet parts. Sardi urges his part in the Benedictus ensemble, a chromatic colloquy which incorporates much of Bach counterpoint in its appreciation that God’s gifts often appear painful by earthbound standards. Of the final two choral sections, the Sanctus erupts with a fervor that verges on emotional violence, the interior lines anacondas of spiritual struggle overcome. With the final Osanna in excelsis Deo, we recall that Mozart never completed this magnificent structure, which has still managed a “finished” performance of the first magnitude.
–Gary Lemco
