My 13 Favorite Missas.

I listened to it like a maniac a few years ago while my grandmother was dying. I prefer something warmer than many seem to. No Toscanini, no Gardiner, no Karajan, no Szell, no showcases for execution. What's at stake is much too important for virtuosity that displays a lack of humility before a work so holy that we can only be unworthy of it.

Others are good but don't quite make it, sometimes quite good: Giulini (live, NOT the 88 minute studio job), Solti, Haitink, Jacobs, Schuricht, earlier Horenstein and Davis and Harnoncourt and Bernstein (the latter being not too different than the Bernstein I pick)... The performances I love are not necessarily old fashioned and romantic, but warmer and more cantabile than many while still keeping the rhythmic interest of the HIP way: the best of both worlds. 18th century tempi, 19th century sound. I get why people love the sonority and diction of HIP, it clearly fits Beethoven's conception like a glove and is easier to sing, but to my ears it also makes the performances sound rather interchangeable. We are still in the adolescence of HIP, and waiting for most of its executors to awaken to the full gamut of capabilities HIP gives us.

OK (literally)... I also need to rant about the famous Klemperer performance. It sucks all the air out of the room like a late Celibidache. It's Wagnerism at its worst: bombastic, pompous, larger than life with a missing heart.

There is so much by Klemperer that is great, particularly in Beethoven. There's even a truly great Klemperer Missa Solemnis ten years earlier. Even by his eighties, Klemperer was still doing high quality work, but how this recording is touted as one of his crowning achievements I'll never know. In Klemperer's famous reading, I feel no spiritual grace, no hope, no transcendence; only the trappings of solemnity without the real thing.

...though it's still much better than the Giulini studio recording which makes flies drop to the floor as quickly as reading a doctoral thesis on statistical methodology.

I believe the Missa Solemnis is a work about hope: hope in this world and the next. Hope for the future, and hope that our ends are not ends but transitions to something that makes our suffering here worthwhile.

There are also certain performances of which I'm of two minds. Particularly Szell and Toscanini. 

On the one hand they sound 'defiant' and 'heroic,' which can give off a kind of optimism and hope and joy. On the other hand, they sound like they're always pissed off. I've always felt you can hear the rage disorder in Toscanini and Szell, but raging in Beethoven is usually to the good... But there is so much virtuoso exhibitionism in those recordings. What's the point in mastering the Missa Solemnis's labyrinthine challenges if the focus becomes the technique rather than the spirit? To me, tough 'new objectivists' like Horenstein and earlier Klemperer (irony duly noted) achieve the kind of 'defiant heroism' I think Szell and Toscanini aspire to when they yield to their better angels.

We could talk about singing and playing and microdetails, but this post grew out of a small note to friends, and I'd rather not spend a Beethovenian length of time on this post. In some ways, ideal execution misses the point of this work. Every moment spent on getting the technical details exactly right is a moment that can be spent on getting more expressive nuance.

Best of both worlds:

Michael Gielen. My single favorite Missa (note: until right after writing this post. See two posts above): HIP tempos, traditional sound. I don't know what else to say. This is what I dreamed of hearing in my head. Maybe your own ideal of a work is not enough and you should seek out the versions which tell you what you didn't know already, but I can't deny that this is what I hear when without judging the performance, I simply want to sit in heartfelt contemplation of this work I hold sacred.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGS6zs6Rxs

Rafael Kubelik. My all time favorite conductor giving a slightly slower and more flexible performance but still kinda similar to Gielen: spiritual without the sludge. At many points it is mercurial and visionary after the manner of certain performances below, but not larger-than-life after the manner of Bernstein and Walter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MM2K1OHGgA

Kurt Masur doing another similar one from East Germany, still fleeter and more metric than Gielen's. Many performers you can describe as 'warmth coated discipline', but for Masur, regimented as his interpretations always were, the warmth always mattered more. In Masur, it's 'discipline-coated warmth.' I don't want to focus on the actual singing in these recordings, because once you start on that subject it's impossible to stop, so I'll simply say, from soloists to chorus, this is the best sung Missa I've ever heard, the velvet orchestral playing of the Gewandhaus supporting them at every turn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-KkCOVVT48

'Ecstatic visions':

Bruno Walter - If you listen all the way through to one.... so far as we can tell, maybe the best performance of it ever caught by mic, but the sound's absolutely atrocious. It's not just exciting, it's not just moving, it's not just passionate or spiritual, it's as though the entire universe of the Missa Solemnis' potential meanings and emotions and soul-states are encapsulated into one performance. If you can persist, it's as worth hearing as any performance of anything has ever been. I don't know if Mahler did it, but if he did, this must be close to how.

Bruno Walter, New York Philharmonic Orchestra & Westminster Choir - Beethoven: Missa Solemnis (live)

Dmitri Mitropoulos - Another personal favorite. The most exciting conductor who ever lived, gives another performance in Walter's ecstatic mode with the same orchestra in the same hall five years later. Two performances in which tempos, dynamics, and phrasing are completely unpredictable. Another that demands to be heard in spite of atrocious sound. There used to be a video of this on youtube that was not quite this tinny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UysjVu6dWHM

Lenny at Tanglewood: sparks everywhere... We're lucky the grounds didn't catch fire.

...I'm tempted to leave this comment alone, but the truth is that Bernstein does similarly, and nearly as well in the New York studio recording of 11 years earlier, which has certain weaknesses (oversaturated sound that makes the choir sound like a Golden Age Disney musical), it is much easier to find (not, however, in the more famous Concertgebouw recording, which is unusually lacquered for Bernstein. Perhaps the chemistry with the Concertgebouw was lacking). This being Lenny, drama will always take precedence over spirituality, but what drama! This is a Missa of enthusiasm, and even if Lenny veers into exhibitionism, the constant precedence of his New York sized heart over his Boston-sized ego is a large part of why we love him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0EA9yNuOXQ

Eugen Jochum - another personal favorite conductor. Similar in scale to the famous Klemperer, but much more flexible tempi and less pompous. Jochum was the warmest of all the great German conductors, and more emotionally willing to be vulnerable than any of them until Tennstedt. No celebration of his musicianship has yet been great enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KsF2fdMdRo&list=PLxV6VwFCe969ZDcL3FM2nwunPTsZZigAN

Tough New Objectivists:

Erich Kleiber breaking every rule in the book, holding our attention with an eighty-five minute Missa that's five minutes slower than the famous Klemperer I complain about. Erich Kleiber, at least in his mature phase, is a dry-eyed conductor, completely dismissive of any affectation that might bespeak sentimentality. This is not the most moving Missa Solemnis, but it is the most profound and creates a rapt atmosphere of calm. The vocalism and sound is not great (at the opening of the Credo, the sound wavers slightly in pitch), but the pianissimos make your heart stop. Before you know what happened, the soul is cleansed.

Mass in D Major, Op. 123, "Missa Solemnis": Kyrie: Assai sostenuto (Mit Andacht)

Otto Klemperer pre-sludge, ten years and change before the famous recording. This is the Klemperer we all say we love, when every note feels like a statement of defiance and heroism from which no obstacle can deter. Not necessarily granitic, but focused on the structure's giant arc and underlying spirit of the piece with no frills at all. Like Kleiber, this is where catharsis lays, and in both of them there's some absolutely beautiful organ playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LylzR4SZP4


Jascha Horenstein shoehorning everything into decidedly odd tempos but getting the most explosive sounds any performing forces ever got in this piece. A truly expressionist musician unlike any other, who unleashed unprecedented expressive extremes within an iron frame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbGI6KIho-w

Bizarre late thoughts:

Nikolaus Harnoncourt's last performance before he died. A very different, introverted, lyrical Missa. My only preferred HIP version because most of the others sound alike. Harnoncourt, so filled with larger than life personality in so much else, scales the Missa down to intimacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE6pX7_tzoA&list=PL9JH_yeccE1qa2-J6Qae-e3rIE7CQHj9I

Colin Davis shortly before he died. The height of spirituality, very slow yet iffy execution even so. If you have a sound system for it, there's sonority in the fortes that peels paint, but Davis is at the height of his late style's luminous warmth. It's fallible, but even so, it's soul music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_gAcPWm6aI

Herbert Blomstedt, who never dies, doing a genuinely happy, merry Missa as though it were by Haydn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWumpBmp7P8

Personal favorites among the favorites:
Gielen

Kubelik

Walter

Bernstein

Jochum