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About Mass & Other Sacred Music
Product description A New Song - Messe - Christus vincit - Gaudeamus in loci pace (orgue seul) - Seinte Mari moder milde - A Child's Prayer - Changed / Westminster Cathedral Choir, dir. Martin Baker Amazon.com This recording of 's Mass is an intense, emotionally charged 70 minutes reflecting the composer's deeply held religious beliefs. These are beliefs that, as he has said in commenting on the mood of his Mass, are not immune to doubts and fears and an awareness of the "tragedies and uncertainties of our age." So don't expect an easy listen. The music featured on this album unfolds slowly, patiently, seeming to exist outside time, and yet is colored by extremes of pitch and dynamic requiring great virtuosity and control. The Mass, which is written in Latin and incorporates priest and congregation in liturgical use, could have been written for the singers of the Westminster Cathedral Choir featured here, who know its contours intimately. The traditional hard-edged sound of the Westminster Cathedral trebles cut through the vast acoustic like a knife, right up until the wonderfully imaginative hold-your-breath ending of the "Agnus Dei." A range of other British cathedrals and churches that boast connections with MacMillan's works are included, among them St. Paul's Cathedral and King's College Chapel, Cambridge. The Scottish accents of "A New Song" beguile and bewitch, while the moving "A Child's Prayer" commemorates the 1996 Dunblane tragedy. Among the soloists, treble David de Winter provides some breathtaking moments in "Christus Vincit." --Andrew Green Review MacMillan knows that his background' his deeply held Catholicism will divide, and that while some will be drawn closer, others will be pushed away by the religious underpinning of so much of his choral work.' I quote from James Whitbourn's booklet notes accompanying this new release. The premise is false: you don't have to share MacMillan's beliefs to respond to his music any more than you are required to conform to Palestrina's outlook or, indeed, sympathize with the dubious enthusiasms that allowed Strauss to write fanfares for Hitler's ceremonial occasions. I'm just as much an atheist as MacMillan is a Catholic, and I found the works on this disc among the most successful in his entire output. Similarly, you don't need to subscribe to his beliefs to recognize the burning urgency they bring to the scores wherein they are directly expressed: no atheist could have written this music.The musical language seems to bridge two worlds: the choral writing is plainly modern, liberally dissonant, with an organ part that often suggests Messiaen, Camilleri and other such piquant writers for the instrument. And yet the harmonies and the chant-influenced melodic lines have a modal tinge which simultaneously gives the textures an age-old feeling, as if MacMillan had not composed the music so much as rediscovered it and dusted it down. Whitbourn points out that this Mass setting, the main work here, is MacMillan's third, but the first for a professional choir. It was written for the performers who now turn out this passionate, patently committed performance, the Choir of Westminster Cathedral.The other choral pieces here, most of them hovering around the five- to six-minute mark, show the same effortless blend of the timeless and the new. The effect is underlined by the acoustic, as MacMillan's extended chords float out into the huge spaces of Westminster Cathedral (the recorded sound is excellent). The solo organ piece, Gaudeamus in loci pace, makes clearest MacMillan's debt to the ornithologizing Messiaen. A decorative, almost chirruping, line high over held basses directly evokes similar textures in Messiaen's organ music and also, Whitbourn informs us, the birdlife around Pluscarden Abbey, a Benedictine community in Morayshire, for which the piece was written in 1998.This music, the Mass in particular, is virtually guaranteed a passage into the central repertoi
