Johann Sebastian Bach: Messe in h-moll (DVD, Br-Klassik)

With the High Mass in B minor, Bach set a climax and, at the same time, the end of his life’s work as a composer: this great Catholic Mass, his only mass composition in which he set the full ordinarium of the Latin mass text to music, was his last major vocal work. His mass, completed in 1748/49, is a musical masterpiece in which the baroque musical splendor is always in the foreground, but contemplative moments and intimate chorales are also essential components. The Latin ordinarium forms the silk thread on which all these musical pearls are strung. Even after almost three hundred years, the music of Bach’s Mass in B minor is still lively, fresh and a true baroque delight can now be experienced in concert or from the record . What makes the live recording of the concert performance from June 2016 published here special are the unused voices of the young and outstanding vocal soloists, the crystal-clear sound, which is repeatedly praised in the highest tones, and the immense plasticity of the Bavarian Radio Choir under the direction of Peter Dijkstra and of course the renowned original sound ensemble Concerto Köln. And it is also the lively live atmosphere of a concert event that thrilled the audience and even managed to elicit the adjective enchanting from the Munich reviewer, a rare, but in this case well-deserved praise! Bach’s Mass in B minor is now also published on DVD: as a recording of a concert on the occasion of the ION International Organ Week in Nuremberg in the St. Lorenz Church in Nuremberg.