Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Gloria, FP 177 (1961)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Mass No.5 in A flat major, D 678 (1819)
Elsa Benoit (soprano), Ulrike Malotta (alto), Patrick Grahl (tenor), Klaus Häger (bass)
Holger Gehring (organ)
Dresdner Kreuzchor
Dresdner Philharmonie/Martin Lehmann
rec. 2024, Kulturpalast, Dresden, Germany
Berlin Classics 0303770BC [63]
The famous Kreuzchor is the choir of the Kreuzkirche Dresden, Church of the Cross, one of the largest Lutheran churches in Germany. The past choristers include Peter Schreier, Theo Adam, René Pape, Karl Richter and many other distinguished musicians. The choir, about one hundred and fifty strong nowadays, consists of boys aged nine to nineteen. They have made numerous recordings for Berlin Classics with their previous conductor Roderich Kreile, and now with Martin Lehmann. This is essentially a youth choir, but undeniably a very fine one.
The Koussevitsky Foundation commissioned Francis Poulenc’s Gloria. Charles Munch gave the first performance in Boston in January 1961. One of Poulenc’s last large-scale works, Gloria has become a firm choral favourite. It typifies Poulenc’s kaleidoscopic shifts of mood. It moves dizzily from high seriousness through bucolic good humour to an aura of enraptured mystery.
Poulenc’s music may be appealing, but he can often be quite tough on the performers. The choral writing has several highly treacherous moments, though I doubt the composer realised how dangerous they were – or if he did, he did not really care too much! By and large, the young choristers of the Kreuzchor do well, though unsurprisingly they sound tentative in those notorious unison Amens towards the end.
It is a noble effort. The Dresdner Philharmonie and the stylish soprano Elsa Benoit make an excellent contribution. But one really needs a choir with the extra heft of adult voices. Take, for example, Michel Piquemal and his Regional Île-de-France Vittoria Choir on Naxos (8.553176).
Franz Schubert’s Mass in A flat is the penultimate one of his six settings. It comes from the time when Schubert, as he moved into that miraculous period of maturity, was struggling to forge his new style. As a result, he worked on one piece after another that did not reach completion. In 1818-1823, he produced four unfinished symphonies (including the Unfinished Symphony!), an unfinished oratorio, an unfinished string quartet and three unfinished piano sonatas. As several writers have commented, one of the most remarkable things about this Mass is that he actually managed to complete it at all!
Schubert was brought up as a devout Christian, and his faith was undoubtedly of central importance to him. His Mass settings were personal as well as public statements. He would have been familiar with Haydn’s great works in the genre. It is interesting that the A flat Mass gives great prominence to the wind instruments, as Haydn had done in his final Mass setting, the Harmoniemesse of 1802. (Harmonie in German can refer to wind band.)
But let us be honest: this is not great Schubert. For example, the fugal setting of cum sancto spiritu at the end of the Gloria is disastrously protracted. Later, we find him trying out audacious tonal procedures that must have sounded downright peculiar to the good folk of Vienna in 1819. For example, he begins his Sanctus in the key of F major, arriving four bars later in F# minor. He then repeats the process, starting from D major, and arriving in E flat minor. Excuse the technicalities, but it does sound pretty odd. By the time he reached Winterreise and the late chamber and piano music, he had mastered this sort of extreme tonal shift, but here he is still learning.
What of conductor Martin Lehmann? In Gloria, he adopts rather heavy, plodding tempi, notably in the first and last movements, and shows an irritating tendency to slow down towards the ends of phrases. Given also his young choir’s often marginally late entries (possibly because of their distance from the conductor in the Kulturpalast where it was recorded), this undermines the exuberance of Poulenc’s score.
In the Mass, it is the other way round. Lehmann’s tempi are alarmingly quick; the poor cellos must fear for their wrists in the pizzicato accompaniment of the Benedictus!The Credo is more than a minute shorter here than, to give one example, John Eliot Gardiner (not known for slow tempi!) takes on his Philips recording (4565782). Such numbers do not matter in themselves, but they indicate a fundamental problem: inappropriate tempi.
Schubert’s Mass may be an imperfect work but, as all his oeuvre, it is still worth hearing; alas, not so much in this recording, even if the four young soloists, a well-balanced group, do the best they can.
Gwyn Parry-Jones
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