Stoltzer Missa Duplex

Missa Johnouchi (城之内 ミサ; Jōnouchi Misa) is a composer, pianist, conductor and singer who creates Asian-styled new-age music. . Missa Johnouchi was named UNESCO Artist for Peace in August 2006.

Johannes Ockeghem (c1410 - 1497) was a composer who had one of the most far reaching impacts on the history of music. He was also the father of the musical form of the canon. So whether it is a canon by a modern composer, by Bach or by Pachabel - all these are but ripples of the impact that this man had on the destiny of Western music. However of all of the surviving works - there is a sadly lost 36 part mass cycle - the Missa Prolationum is the one that shows the grandiosity of his musical vision, his audacity and the genius of his mind perhaps far greater than any other.

It is my opinion that Jean Langlais has written some of the noblest, richest and most awe-inspiring sacred music there has ever been. He wrote more organ music than J. S. Bach, and most of it is as suitable for liturgical performance as sung music. His style is a powerful mixture of chant-like motifs (including actual quotations from Gregorian chant), organum, and bold dissonances that give way to pure, radiant tonality. He draws on a wide range of expressions too, from radiant and blazing to quiet and ecstatic. He was truly a craftsman of the highest calibre, and a credit to the distinguished musical heritage of his native France.

In his Missa Solemnis, Beethoven grasped heavenward hoping to touch the face of a God he could neither see nor hear, in a supreme effort to bolster his own inner convictions. That’s why you can view the piece from pretty much any faith-led or philosophical standpoint and the music still seems powerful and meaningful. Leonard Bernstein was a cogent and committed arbiter who succeeded superbly in conveying to all who would listen his own intellectually ferocious vision of what the piece truly signifies. Thus, DG’s Galleria reissue of his 1978 Concertgebouw performance is one of the greatest utterances of Bernstein’s Indian summer on the Yellow Label.

With no slight intended to the other great recordings of the Missa Solemnis in the world, there's this one and then there are all the rest. Truly. Even with the 1940 Toscanini and the 1974 Böhm, this 1965 recording of Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus embodies everything that's great about the Missa Solemnis.

It's not as bad as it might be, but still, except as a memento of the occasion, there really isn't much reason for Eugene Ormandy's 1967 recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis to have been reissued. Columbia's stereo sound was distant and a little tubby and Sony's digital remastering is a little closer but still tubby. The singing is okay but nothing special: Arroyo's is probably the best, but Forrester, and especially Siepi, were showing their vocal age by 1967.

As the old saying goes, "the third time's the charm." This is indeed the third time the German label Accent has issued this coupling of Domenico Scarlatti's Stabat Mater with João Rodrigues Esteves' Missa a oito voces. The first time was in 1990, when the recording by Currende under the leadership of Erik van Nevel was new, and the second in 1998 as part of a box set containing this and several recordings by Concerto Palatino. No complaints here, though, as this is one of the finest discs Accent has to offer.

The modern-day appreciation of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti takes a decisive turn in the direction of his church music with this early eighteenth-century composer’s Missa Sancti Pauli given an ideal recording on Glossa by György Vashegyi, the Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra. Conti was a Florentine who worked for much of his career in the Imperial Court in Vienna, generating much attention there – the ever-observant JS Bach and Zelenka were both known to have been attracted by his music. Curiously, it was liturgical works like this 1715 Missa Sancti Pauli which kept Conti’s name known until near to the end of the nineteenth century rather than the operas, oratorios and cantatas with which he delighted the Viennese Court and which have hitherto been receiving the attention of artists and record labels today. If Conti’s church music is less fledgling Classical than his dramatic fare, there is much in the way of melodic tunefulness and concertato style – for both voices and instruments – to combine with fugal-imitative writing reminiscent of the stile antico.