In the hinterlands of Catholic Germany -- Munich, to be precise -- they still honor the great religious works of Austro-Germanic composers, works that most of the rest of the music-loving world more or less completely ignores. As this 1997 recording of Haydn's Missa Cellensis demonstrates, even third-string performers in the Bavarian capital are capable of giving convincing performances of works hardly played outside the German-speaking world. While the conductor (Gerd Guglhör), the orchestra (the Neue Hofkapelle München), ...
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In the hinterlands of Catholic Germany -- Munich, to be precise -- they still honor the great religious works of Austro-Germanic composers, works that most of the rest of the music-loving world more or less completely ignores. As this 1997 recording of Haydn's Missa Cellensis demonstrates, even third-string performers in the Bavarian capital are capable of giving convincing performances of works hardly played outside the German-speaking world. While the conductor (Gerd Guglhör), the orchestra (the Neue Hofkapelle München), the chorus (the Orpheus Chor München), and the soloists (Priska Eser-Streit, Anne Buter, Christoph Genz, and Thomas Hamberger) are all almost complete unknowns outside of southern Germany, they have here produced a performance to convert unbelievers. The fervor of their tone, the purity of their intonation, and the intensity of their interpretations reveal Haydn's Missa Cellensis to be a work as grand and glorious as the greatest religious works of Bach or Palestrina, or Josquin, and...
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