Good opportunity to listen to the Mass not from my DGG Kubelick w/Bavarian Radio Symphony, but this:
Bretislav Bakala conducting the Brno Radio Symphony, Moravian Academic Singing Association,
& Vach Moravian Lady Teacher's Choir
recorded in 1951
The sound is perfectly fine, loud. This is an affordable, must-have box for the Janacekian.
Intro: Starts majestic, like Sinfonietta, then goes into contorted, recursive sound shapes. Can't help thinking of Gothic architecture & art, the nick-whittling slashes of woodcuts and rough-hewn statues.
Kyrie: Warmth, food & shelter after cold travel, but in a very unfamiliar society.
Gloria: Tense, angular modernist strings. This is music from a church could draw me. Services that make you nervous without making you feel damned.
Credo: A sound-feeling of mortal hazard abruptly gives way to the supple ease of a well-fed healthy body.
Example: watch the birds in the woods: as paranoid as a ninja one moment, next as seemingly at home in the world as if they had drink in hand, about to tell a good story.
This is a Janacek trope, a distillation or precipitate of the entire ceaseless movement of nature, as in a mandala.
(The Cunning Little Vixen is
all this.)
Then some insistent pipe organ. The singers stack up the articles of faith in an intricate pile. Like cathedrals with such complex sculptural articulation they suck shadows into their depths, like a mousetrap for the devil.
Sanctus: Begins as a peaceful drifting anthem of the saved soul & the satisfied mind. Then it turns nervous again. The eternal problem is to be up for facing the energy of life, battering you like a ship in a storm.
Agnus Dei: This sounds like being called in to give a statement to the police.
Postludium (after game?): What do you mean?
Who doesn't like pipe organ music?
Intrada: Back to the big heraldic Sinfonietta trumpeting of men pretending to be angels (great job!)