David Hulett

It was The Bach Choir (under Sir David Willcocks) which played an important role in helping rehabilitate the Missa Sabrinensis, and this fine recording with David Hill marks a significant new chapter in the work’s performance history.

The three works on this recording mark staging posts in Herbert Howells’s compositional life. Sine nomine was commissioned at Elgar’s instigation when Howells was 30 and is predominantly orchestral, with wordless parts for the two vocal soloists. This arch-like ‘spiritual meditation’ was his first extended work for larger forces. Like the Hymnus paradisi (Naxos 8570352), the Stabat Mater is a direct musical reponse to the death of the composer’s nine year-old son, and further reveals his mastery of choral and orchestral polyphony. The Te Deum signalled a fresh and new approach to settings of Anglican canticles.

This is the latest in a long series of Handel oratorios that Budday has recorded (in public performances) for K&K's "Maulbronn Monastery Edition". Above all, tenor Hulett places very honorably. The chorus is particularly energetic and expressive this time. It is extraordinarily vivid, to be sure, with individual singers and even sections of the chorus, very precisely placed in the sonic spread. Ten recordings (in English) over the years, and so many of them of value - that's a good showing for Handel's profoundly moving, valedictory masterpiece.

Mozart’s third venture into the “opera seria” genre, demolished its traditional boundaries to open the way to lyric drama. Blending youthful earnestness with mature mastery, Mozart uses - while profoundly changing - the elements of a genre based on arias that come one after another with no real concern for dramatic progression. The importance and expressive power of the choruses, influenced by the operatic reforms of Gluck, foreshadows The Magic Flute. Idomeneo is often regarded as Mozart’s first masterpiece for the opera house.

Philippe Herreweghe's 2011 recording of Ludwig van Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in D major receives high marks, not only for the elegant period treatment, but also for the profound conviction of the performance. The Collegium Vocale Ghent and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées deliver the music with a somewhat smaller sound than one usually hears in modern performances; the Classical proportions of the ensembles allow details to stand out with utter clarity and the choral parts to move with greater fluidity and transparency than permitted with much larger choruses.