Missa Pastoralis Bohemica

It was when the young Haydn was appointed Kapellmeister to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that he composed his Missa Cellensis, a work of vast proportions, whose popularity is demonstrated by the many surviving copies.
In this interpretation full of vivid contrasts, the RIAS Kammerchor and the Akademie für Alte Musik confirm their extraordinary ability to reveal every subtlety of a composition that possesses almost operatic energy.

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He took piano lessons as a boy and attended the Garrison and Boston Latin Schools. At Harvard University, he studied with Walter Piston, Edward Burlingame-Hill, and A. Tillman Merritt, among others. Before graduating in 1939, he made an unofficial conducting debut with his own incidental music to "The Birds," and directed and performed in Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock." Then at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, he studied piano with Isabella Vengerova, conducting with Fritz Reiner, and orchestration with Randall Thompson.

German conductor Eugen Jochum is considered by many to have been the foremost Bruckner conductor of the mid- to late twentieth century; he producing many outstanding recordings of Bruckner's symphonies (as well as worthy interpretations of a great many other composers). He also left to posterity a number of written articles on the interpretation of that composer. Musical studies began in early childhood (both of Eugen's brothers, Otto Jochum and Georg Ludwig Jochum, went on to become successful musicians in their own right), and Jochum attended the Augsburg Conservatory until he was 20 years of age. He enrolled in the Munich Academy of Music as a composition student of Hermann von Waltershausen, but soon diverted his energies to conducting (working with Siegmund von Hausegger). He worked as a rehearsal assistant at the Munich National Theater, and, after a successful Munich debut in 1926, was invited to join the conducting staff at the Kiel opera. In 1926, having developed a sizable operatic repertory, he moved to Mannheim (1929-1930) and then to Duisburg (1930-1932).

The Missa Cellensis in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae in C major by Joseph Haydn, Hob. XXII:5, Novello 3, was originally written in 1766, after Haydn was promoted to Kapellmeister at Eszterháza following the death of Gregor Joseph Werner. The original title as it appears on the only surviving fragment of Haydn's autograph score, that has been discovered around 1970 in Budapest, clearly assigns the mass to the pilgrimage cult of Mariazell, Styria. Until that discovery, the work was known as Missa Sanctae Caeciliae, or in German Cäcilienmesse, a title probably attributed to the mass in the 19th century. Whether the alternative title refers to a performance of the piece by the St. Cecilia's Congregation, a Viennese musician's fraternity, on some St. Cecilia's day (22 November), as has been suggested, remains speculation.

Inscribed to the memory of Grace Williams’s friend Nancy Elizabeth Jenkins, who died of cancer shortly before the work was completed, Grace Williams’s Missa Cambrensis is a full-scale setting of the Mass in Latin and Welsh, scored for soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists, mixed chorus, boys’ choir, orchestra and speaker. The orchestral forces required consist of two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, (second doubling cor anglais), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (two players: cymbals, glockenspiel, tubular bells, tamtam), piano and strings.

Inscribed to the memory of Grace Williams’s friend Nancy Elizabeth Jenkins, who died of cancer shortly before the work was completed, Grace Williams’s Missa Cambrensis is a full-scale setting of the Mass in Latin and Welsh, scored for soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists, mixed chorus, boys’ choir, orchestra and speaker.

Franz Josef Aumann received his musical training as a choirboy in Vienna, together with Michael Haydn and Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. At the age of 25, he joined St Florian's Abbey, where he took over the choir just two years later and then directed the church music for over four decades.

Several masses scored for large forces attest to the outstanding compositional skills of the Salzburg master Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704). For Salzburg Cathedral, Biber prepared polychoric pieces modelled on the grand performance practice in Venice. The 'Missa Alleluja' was probably composed after 1690 and certainly before 1698: the original score from Salzburg is lost but excellent copies have been preserved at the Upper Austrian abbey at Kremsmünster, which serve as a basis for the present recording.

Conductor René Jacobs' turn to Beethoven has yielded impressive results by going back to Beethoven's works and rethinking them from the ground up.