Mozart : Grande Messe en ut mineur (Ferenc Fricsay)

Album review

Tahra's Mozart: Grosse Messe consists of a glorious stereo recording made of Mozart's "Great" Mass in C minor featuring conductor Ferenc Fricsay leading the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra with the Choeurs de la Cathédrale Ste. Hedwig and soloists led by Maria Stader and Ernst Haefliger in Berlin on September 29, 1959. It was recorded the day before a very famous and long established Deutsche Grammophon catalog item of the Great Mass was made, with the same conductor, soloists, and forces, so one might wonder "why bother to put this out?" It runs within in a minute of the same duration of the studio recording that followed it! Because this live recording -- like the DG studio recording -- is excellent; Fricsay was an outstanding Mozart conductor and used essentially the same usual suspects that peopled Karl Richter's Bach recordings. Tahra's historical recording is remarkably stable and full, the performance is moving, dynamic, and Stader is right on the money in terms of the soprano solo part; she is arrestingly intense in the opening "Kyrie" and remains that way for most of the disc. There is an exception in that Stader is a little unsteady in the first section of "Et incarnates est," but for that matter Fricsay's band seems to have lost its bearings at the start of this movement, with the vagaries of live recording, no doubt, at foot. But overall this is a powerful recording that commands one's attention throughout, and listeners will be astonished at the range, gravity, and clarity of the recording quality, which seems hardly possible for a recording more than five decades old.
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