Biber: Baroque Splendor - Missa Salisburgensis
Recorded in Cardona (Catalunya) January 14-16, 2015 except for La Battalia à 10, recorded on February 11th, 2002
Hanna Bayodi-Hirt, Marianne Beate Kielland, Pascal Bertin, David Sagastume, Nicholas Mulroy, Lluis Vilamajó, Daniele Carnovich, Antonio Abete
La Capella Reial de Catalunya & Le Concert des Nations, Jordi Savall
This is Biber in gargantuan mode … superbly recorded. Groups ranging from solo voices with a pair of recorders to the full ensemble complete with brass and drums are thrown across the huge spaces...
Biber: Baroque Splendor - Missa Salisburgensis
Recorded in Cardona (Catalunya) January 14-16, 2015 except for La Battalia à 10, recorded on February 11th, 2002
Hanna Bayodi-Hirt, Marianne Beate Kielland, Pascal Bertin, David Sagastume, Nicholas Mulroy, Lluis Vilamajó, Daniele Carnovich, Antonio Abete
La Capella Reial de Catalunya & Le Concert des Nations, Jordi Savall
Purchase product
This is Biber in gargantuan mode … superbly recorded. Groups ranging from solo voices with a pair of recorders to the full ensemble complete with brass and drums are thrown across the huge spaces...
About
cd book
The 'Missa Salisburgensis à 53 voci' (in comparison, 'Spem in alium' was written by Thomas Tallis for «only» 40 voices) is perhaps the largest-scale piece of extant sacred Baroque music, an archetypical work of the Colossal Baroque. It is a polychoral composition which takes advantage of the multiple organs and various locations available for groups of singers and musicians to perform in Salzburg Cathedral, probably for the 1682 celebrations marking the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the Archbishopric of Salzburg. This stunning recording features Jordi Savall’s ensembles at their best and fully reveals the «splendour» of this masterpiece. A recording of cosmic proportions that Jordi Savall has decided to illustrate with a celestial image of the Helix Nebula. Nothing less.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
Christmas 2015
This is Biber in gargantuan mode … superbly recorded. Groups ranging from solo voices with a pair of recorders to the full ensemble complete with brass and drums are thrown across the huge spaces of the chapel with palpable excitement and thrilling effect. The reverberation lasts over five seconds, yet every detail in the small scale passages is crystal clear, and the sheer weight of the full forces is shattering.
November 2015
Savall marshals the music with a keen sensibility to momentum, balance and colour…[his] more organically natural acoustic makes for an easier overall listen [than the Koopman or McCreesh versions] while losing only a little in forthright splendour…[the Mass] makes its awesome point.
February 2016
The central work on the disc is the astonishing Missa Salisburgensis, but Savall surrounds this with a range of other works, choral and instrumental, that show this remarkable composer off to a dazzling degree. It's my greatest musical discovery of the year so far...It's very well sung but the effect when the voices, trumpets and drums all combine is breathtaking, and the engineers deserve credit for capturing it so faithfully...Overall, tremendous.
10th September 2015
Savall rallies his ensembles to scale the exultant heights but still keeps things nimble; the full ensemble sound is warm, vibrant and spacious, while shapely solo voices make clear work of all that counterpoint...Savall is in his element [in Battalia], leading the dance with supple, graceful swing.
10th October 2015
an ingenious balancing act between solo voices, choirs and brass, particularly in the ensemble developments of the Gloria and the lengthy Credo, with its shift from angelic high voices to deep, sorrowful ones as the crucifixion weighs heavily.
October 2015
[a] superb new recording … The venue chosen for this recording – the Romanesque chapel of Cardona Castle in Catalonia – also possesses generous reverberation, but Savall knows how to capitalise on it, allowing the music to bloom and blaze but also to withdraw intimately into itself … the overall impression of sumptuousness certainly lives up to the CD’s Baroque Splendour title.
