Herbert Schernus - F.J. Gossec: Messe Des Morts (2005)

Technically this recording may be an interesting audiophile curiosity: a 1980 recording of the Gossec Messe des Morts or requiem mass, made in a church in the German city of Wuppertal, is retooled using an arsenal of digital editing techniques into a Super Audio CD release ready to feed the growing appetite for music by composers of the Classical era other than Haydn and Mozart. François-Joseph Gossec (1734-1829) was France's greatest composer of the late eighteenth century, one of the creators of a monumental, spatially innovative strain in French music that remained influential all the way up to Berlioz. The remaking of analog into digital sound is fraught with pitfalls, but it has been expertly accomplished here; remarkable levels of detail emerge in the warm singing of the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and in the brasses that sound through the rather conventionally apocalyptic Dies Irae. One can understand why the Capriccio label wished to reissue this recording; it's a superb performance of a large and little-known work. Soprano Eva Csapó and thick-as-molasses alto Hildegard Laurich are well worth hearing in the solo sections; baritone Alessandro Corbelli tends at times to get lost in Gossec's thick choral textures. The only thing missing is a really compelling composition. The Messe des Morts is an early work by Gossec, dating from 1760; it has flashes of his mature style (for instance in the jerking choral leaps of the Confutatis maledictis section of the Dies Irae and the calm, all-male melody that opens the Pie Jesu in the Sanctus), but there is some fairly uninspired diatonic thrashing around as well. Those interested in French Classical-era music should seek this disc out, but those more generally curious about Gossec might try his Christmas oratorio La nativité instead. -- James Manheim