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Mozart's "Great" Mass K427 in May Concert.


Mozart late in life
Mozart Late in Life.
Detail from a painting by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, Vienna. Scanned from photograph.

The first Great Hall concert for 2005 will feature Mozart's C minor Mass K427. Rehearsals commenced on Monday January 31 and auditions for places in the choir will continue on February 7. Midi rehearsal files are now available in the members-only area.

The C minor Mass, K427 is a technically and musically challenging work for choir and soloists - its subtitle the "The Great" Mass is fully justified even though the work remains incomplete.

One of the many glories of this Mass is the aria for solo soprano, "Laudamus Te" ("We Praise Thee") written for Mozart's then new bride Constanze. The other grand moment for soprano, the setting of “Et incarnatus est” where the singer is accompanied by obbligato winds, is closely modeled after one of Mozart’s favorite arias, “Se il padre perdei,” from his hit opera Idomeneo; apparently Wolfgang and Constanze liked to perform this aria together en famille.

"So here was a new work to show his old colleagues in Salzburg how far he had already come, and to introduce to them his new companion, a lovely young soprano. The only drawback to this picture is that, in fact, Mozart never finished his Mass. We have the Kyrie and Gloria and part of the Credo, with much of the details left unfinished. After the great “Et incarnatus est” aria, there is nothing more of the Credo. The other movements survive in different states: the Sanctus, for example, has come down to us in a copy made rather later, in which a double-choir texture seems to be hurriedly copied onto only four choral staves."
  - The above written with help from program notes by Robert Mealy.

Our conductor, Christopher Bowen agrees with current musicological research that the movements added by Alois Schmitt of Dresden in 1900 to complete the work or fill in the missing movements are best left out of the current performance.

"Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world's great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province... Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated."
  - Aaron Copland, Copland on Music (1960)