Biber: Missa Salisburgensis

Salzburg has long been an essential place of pilgrimage for fans of Mozart and The Sound of Music. Yet the Austrian city’s musical credentials were forged centuries before the birth of both, cultivated since medieval times and enhanced in the 1600s with extravagant works for big bands of instruments and voices. And none was more extravagant than the Missa Salisburgensis. Almost certainly composed by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Salzburg’s deputy Kapellmeister at the time of the work’s first performance in 1682, its score remained buried in the archives until it was rediscovered and published almost 200 years later. Biber’s monumental Mass was written for a combined force of 53 players and singers. It had to wait until the final decades of the last century before receiving its first high-profile recordings. The most convincing was the spectacular version made in 1997 for Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv label by the Gabrieli Consort & Players and Musica Antiqua Köln, under the direction of Paul McCreesh and Reinhard Goebel. Their Missa Salisburgensis, remastered in 2022 in Spatial Audio, includes parts for solo voices, two choirs comprising 16 singers, sundry Baroque strings and winds, eight trumpets and kettledrums, a pair of high-flying clarino trumpets, three sackbuts, two cornetts and four organs. “It’s an extraordinary piece—the archetypal Counter-Reformation composition,” McCreesh tells Apple Music. “And it makes a colossal sound!” The work, he explains, was written to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the foundation of the bishopric of Salzburg by St Rupert, an occasion apt for fielding the city’s company of court- and field-trumpeters as well as the highly skilled musicians of St Peter’s and Salzburg’s Baroque cathedral. “There are one or two things about the structure of the composition which I find perplexing,” adds McCreesh, “but I think it works well if you accept it for what it is: a big statement piece. We made no apologies for performing it with real military brass, played loud and forthright throughout. It’s not exactly shy and refined! We felt, however, that that was very much within the style of the rather bombastic trumpet writing, which, of course, contrasts beautifully with the mid-Baroque delicacy of Biber’s writing for strings and solo voices.” McCreesh and Goebel chose to couple the Missa Salisburgensis with two sonatas from Biber’s Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes (“Sonatas as much for the altar as for the table”), his Sancti Polycarpi for brass ensemble and organ continuo, and another Biber blockbuster, the motet Plaudite tympana for 54 voices and instruments. They assembled an ace team of musicians for the recording sessions, held at Romsey Abbey in the English county of Hampshire, and created a sense of spatial separation and ideal blend of sound by placing them in every corner of its Norman nave. Archiv treated the Missa Salisburgensis and its companion pieces to a stunning sonic makeover for the album’s 25th-anniversary reissue. The remastered recording uses the surround-sound technology of Dolby Atmos to bring out the dramatic contrasts and heighten the impact of Biber’s music. In addition to delivering heavyweight full-choir heft, the Atmos process has added jaw-dropping clarity to the original recording’s already impressive sound. It also trains a warm spotlight on polyphonic details in the Mass, brilliantly so in the “Et vitam venturi” from the “Credo” (Track 5) and again in the dialogue between instruments and solo voices in the “Osanna” sections of the “Sanctus” (Track 7). Best of all is the lightning-fast shift in the “Agnus Dei” (Track 8), from the full monty of choir, brass and sundry instruments to the spellbinding “Miserere”, hushed yet pin-sharp, deployed by Biber to underline the prayer’s heartfelt petition to the Lamb of God. The chamber-scale instrumental sonatas, too, sound strikingly lifelike, inviting the mind’s eye to conjure images of the Musica Antiqua Köln’s players dancing their way through the music. McCreesh rightly remains proud of the recording. “It brings back very happy memories,” he concludes, “and I really believe it has stood the test of time. If I were to record it again, I don’t think I’d make any substantially different choices. That’s an unusual thing for me to say because there’s a lot of what I’ve done which would be quite different.”