Beethoven and the voice of God
Damian Thompson on Missa Solemnis at the Barbican
10 October 2008

Beethoven thought that his Missa Solemnis was his finest achievement. I can't quite buy that: it's impossible to imagine works more perfectly conceived than the late piano sonatas and string quartets. But, for me, the Mass touches greater heights than any of the symphonies. Its relative neglect, however, is no surprise. The work contains sublime melodies drawn out to almost Wagnerian dimensions - but, like those in Tristan or Parsifal, they are not packaged as tunes.

You do not walk away from the Missa Solemnis humming, as you might from the Ninth Symphony. Nor does it provoke eruptions of applause, because the exhausted choir has fallen silent before the final bars which - even if you produce a rallentando, as Ji_í B_lohlávek did last Friday - feel as if they end in mid-paragraph.

True to form, the reaction from the Barbican audience at the end of this first concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's season was a little muted. But that cannot have reflected any shortcomings in the performance, because there weren't any, not that I could hear. Well, maybe one of Christine Brewer's swoops came to rest a quarter tone out of place, but in every other respect she was perfect: as a true operatic soprano, she can manage the near-shrieks in the score without making them sound strained or ugly, but she can also run up and down the scale with the agility of a baroque specialist - crucial in a work in which the high-speed counterpoint can so easily go fuzzy at the edges.

B_lohlávek had assembled an ideal team of soloists: Brewer, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Paul Groves and Stephen Milling, a mountainous, velvet-voiced mega-bass from Denmark who has enjoyed success as King Marke in Tristan and Hunding in Die Walküre. No egos were on display: this is a Mass without arias, and the soloists kept the dynamics tightly controlled so that we heard (for example) the exquisite flutterings of the flutes in the Et incarnatus more clearly than usual.

The other ingredient of a great Missa Solemnis is a violin soloist who can float above and through the orchestra in the Benedictus, playing tricky arpeggios while still conveying the peace of the Holy Spirit. Many fine recordings of the Mass come to grief at this point. But the orchestra's leader, Stephen Bryant, achieved just the right balance of brilliance and beneficence.

It's widely recognised that the BBC Symphony Orchestra has sprung back to life under Ji_í B_lohlávek. But it is thanks to their chorus master, Stephen Jackson, that the BBC Symphony Chorus rose so spectacularly to the challenge of the conductor's tempi in the fugues, furious even by the standards of period performance.

This was a dramatic Missa Solemnis: the tension was palpable before the explosions of Et ressurexit and Pleni sunt caeli, and the trumpets in the Agnus Dei were nicely clipped, as if on a battlefield. It wasn't, however, a secular reading that reduced the work to a concert piece. We were reminded that Beethoven wrote the Mass for liturgical performance. What a shame that, practical difficulties notwithstanding, it never receives one.