Puccini
's
Messa di Gloria
was composed in 1880. The name
was apparently the result of a printer's error; the work is a full-scale mass, not a Missa brevis with only Kyrie and Gloria. It has only recently begun to find widespread performances, but it richly merits them.
came from a long line of church musicians, and for this student work, it would have been easy for him to write an academic mass setting with big fugues, but he hardly does that at all. Instead, he constructs entirely original operatic conceptions of many of the mass texts. This is true not only in solo passages like the Gratias in the Gloria but in many of the choral passages as well. Consider the Crucifixus, a perfect little pastoral scene.
himself liked the work enough to reuse parts of it in his operas, and not only the early ones. Rediscovered only in 1952, the
Mass
has received a variety of performances, but this loose one by
Gustavo Gimeno
and the
Luxembourg Philharmonic
is especially attractive.
Gimeno
gives room to his fine soloists, tenor
Charles Castronovo
and baritone
Ludovic Tezier
, and the amply-sized choir
Orfeo Catala
sounds like an undiscovered treasure. The program is filled out with early orchestral pieces, including an orchestration of the string quartet
Crisantemi
and the rarely heard and surprisingly Wagnerian
Capriccio Sinfonico
. With
Harmonia Mundi
delivering warm, clear sound from the Philharmonique de Luxembourg, this is a major entry in the
recording canon. ~ James Manheim