Schubert Mass No. 6 Joélle Harvey, Daryl Freedman et al; Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus/Franz Welser-Möst Cleveland Orchestra TCO-0008 46:00 mins
Schubert’s E flat Mass belongs to the miraculously productive final year of his life, and its concluding Agnus Dei is based on the same angular four-note motif that runs through the chilling setting of Heine’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’, composed a few months later. Schubert doesn’t constantly interweave his soloists and chorus, as Haydn does in his late Masses; instead, he uses his solo voices sparingly, and they don’t appear at all until roughly midway through the work, with the Et incarnatus est. That passage is in the form of a lyrical canon with widely spaced vocal entries for soprano and two tenors, inspired perhaps by the drinking canon in the second-act finale of Mozart’s Così fan tutte.
Franz Welser-Möst’s Cleveland forces offer considerable beauty of tone throughout – indeed, it’s possible to feel that the entire performance is over-refined, and that the chorus in particular, for all its admirable warmth, lacks drama and incisiveness where they are called for. The Crucifixus, which runs the whole gamut of dynamics from ppp to fff, is a case in point; and the fugal closing pages of the Sanctus again sound matter-of-fact. In short, there’s a good deal more depth to this most beautiful of Schubert’s Mass settings than Welser-Möst finds.
Misha Donat
