Messa Close

In the interim between 2018’s dark jazz-infused stunner Feast for Water and the recording of its follow-up, Close, Messa guitarist Alberto Piccolo taught himself how to play the oud. The fretless stringed instrument would end up playing a central role on the band’s new album, both for its sonic contributions and its ability to serve as a kind of totemic passport that allowed them to travel from their home in northern Italy to the Middle East (and beyond.) Messa are a doom band, nominally, but they’ve never been limited by the tropes of the genre. Every song on Close illustrates their exploratory spirit. “Hollow” and “Pilgrim” highlight Piccolo’s oud playing, which to these untrained ears sounds like the work of an old pro rather than a relative neophyte. “Suspended” opens with burbling Rhodes piano, while “Orphalese” leads with smoky saxophone—both holdovers from Feast for Water, both even richer in texture this time around. “Leffotrak” is a 45-second hardcore palate cleanser, nestled between two doom epics. Frontwoman Sara Bianchin is the album’s MVP. Her powerful voice is pliable enough to pair brilliantly with any stylistic detour her band cares to take, and it can accelerate from diaphanous whisper to booming roar in a split second—and back again. It’s the best vocal performance on a metal album so far this year.

As regards the quick and complex evolution of Lieder within the timeframe of a few decades, the relationship between poetic text (lyrics) and musical composition undergoes some variations which are worth underscoring. The term Lied indicates primarily a literary genre, a strophic composition (leit means precisely “stanza” in German), whose translation as “song” should not be intended literally; it is similar to our speaking of “canto” in Homer or Dante, i.e. to indicate poetic texts which “only putatively could be accompanied by music” (G. Bevilacqua).

2018 also marks 250 years since Gioachino Rossini’s death in 1868. ‘Messa per Rossini’ was composed in his memory by Verdi and 12 other notable Italian composers Verdi himself composed the concluding Libera me, which he later used in his own ‘Messa da Requiem’. This rare recording represents the work’s triumphant return to the spiritual home of Verdi and Rossini: the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

This disc is a tour de force, a world premiere recording of stunning music splendidly performed. The unjustly obscure Antonio Maria Bononcini was appointed late in life to be maestro di cappella in Modena, a post which allowed him to pour his store of invention into two grand sacred works, a Mass and a Stabat Mater. Conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini engages deeply with the composer’s imagination, opening up his dense counterpoint and delicately binding together his vocal and obbligato lines. The musical rhetoric of the Concerto Italiano is spellbinding, particularly when band and singers heighten gestures to surge powerfully towards a passage’s final cadence. However heated their delivery becomes – and the Stabat Mater does sizzle – the artists never rush. This is particularly crucial for bringing out Bononcini’s modulations and textures, which, because they shift rapidly, need space to breathe.