More Mozart with Marriner, Cotrubas and Co.

I much enjoyed producing the recent post on Mozart's sacred music as performed by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, conductor Neville Marriner and soprano Ileana Cotrubas.

Today's follow-up - the Mozart Requiem - includes much the same roster of artists, including contralto Helen Watts, tenor Robert Tear and baritone John Shirley-Quirk. The only change is in the choral group, which here is the then-new Chorus of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

The Kingsway Hall recording was made in 1977, six years after the Coronation Mass.

The Requiem is a famously fraught work. Incomplete at the death of its composer, it was completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, unfortunately not nearly as skilled as his teacher. This record was the first, or among the first, to attempt to clean up Süssmayr's musical solecisms, using the 1971 edition of the work by Franz Beyer. (Since then, there have been many other such editions to the same purpose.)

Robin Golding of The Gramophone outlined the major changes: "The most noticeable features are a reduction of the colla parte writing for the three trombones (especially in the Benedictus); the curtailing of the trombone solo in the Tuba mirum, after the words 'ante thronum' (at the entry of the solo tenor) - and the slight extension of the closing bars of the Osanna fugue."

Antony Hodgson elaborated in Recordings and Recording: 

It is often conjectured that, despite the very full notes left by Mozart and his direct instructions to Süssmayr, it was perhaps the pupil and not the master who was responsible for the composition of the last three of the 12 sections; and that even the re-use of some earlier music was Süssmayr's re-working rather than Mozart's intention although the music was his.

The sections thought by scholars to be Süssmayr's entire composition (nos 10 and 11) are used in Beyer's edition: this makes it possible, though not certain, that what we have there is Süssmayr edited in Mozart style by Beyer.

At the recording session: Neville Marriner, John Shirley-Quirk,
Robert Tear and Ileana Cotrubas

The critics were pleased with the performance. Typical was Robin Golding:

The choral singing and orchestral playing are of high quality, and there is an excellent team of soloists ... If the performance as a whole suggests the concert hall rather than the cathedral, it is nevertheless appropriately restrained and classical in style notably so in a direct comparison with Karajan's gleaming, operatic performance on DG.

Neville Marriner's version is certainly worth a place among the two or three most satisfactory recordings of this great work; and in its use of the Beyer text it has some claim to being closer than any of the ten other available versions to the sound Mozart himself had in mind.

The sound is among the best late analogue recordings I've heard. The download includes texts and translations from a Böhm release; there were none with the Marriner LP.

LINK

Ileana Cotrubas with Marriner in Mozart

This post is a memorial tribute to the Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who had died at 87. She was a huge opera star for about 15 years before developing vocal problems and retiring in 1989.

Cotrubas was known both for her affecting performances and for her uncompromising views, leading the adulation from critics and audiences and occasional conflicts with directors and conductors who did not meet her standards.

Her obituary in the New York Times (gift link) quotes the critic Alan Blyth saying that she had the power "to make the audience’s heart beat just that much faster as soon as she appears onstage, and to convince it that for the moment nothing in the world matters more to her than to convey the particular predicament of whichever character she is portraying."

Today we will hear her not in opera but in sacred music by Mozart, via what may be her first recording, that of the Coronation Mass, K 317, of 1779, and the  Litaniae Lauretanae, K 195, of 1774. Neville Marriner conducts the Schola Cantorum of Oxford and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, with contralto Helen Watts, tenor Robert Tear and baritone John Shirley-Quirk. The recording is from May 1971, several years before Contrubas' most celebrated opera recordings. It was, however, not her sole venture into sacred music: she also recorded Mozart's Mass in C minor and Requiem, and perhaps other works.

This recording - and in particular the soprano - impressed critic Trevor Harvey of The Gramophone: "I can whole-heartedly recommend the present disc, and not least for the contribution of Ileana Cotrubas. Her singing is simply gorgeous. The others of the solo quartet need no commendation from me by now, for you have only to look at the names. Marriner conducts the Mass with first-rate rhythm and gets great intensity of singing in 'Crucifixus'. Ileana Cotrubus is really marvellous, with her quality and firmness of line."

John Shirley-Quirk, Helen Watts, Robert Tear

The Coronation Mass is, as you might have guessed, associated with royalty. The first record of it being performed was at the coronation of Francis II as Holy Roman Emperor in 1792; and it soon became a favorite for use at important ceremonies at court in Vienna. (The sleeve commentary states that it was associated with the miraculous crowing of an image of the Virgin in 1744; this is now thought not to be the case.)

Mozart composed two settings of the Litaniae Lauretanae, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is the second. "Lauretanae" refers to Loreto. This is a reference to Mary's and the Holy Family's home in Nazareth, which medieval tradition has the angels removing to Dalmatia and then to Loreto, Italy in the 13th century, to escape wartime destruction. The Litany was written for Salzburg Cathedral.

Neville Marriner

While Trevor Harvey singled out Cotrubas in his review, all the soloists are excellent, as is the vintage ASMF under the estimable Marriner. The chorus master was Andrew Parrott, at the time the conductor of the Schola Cantorum. George Malcolm provided the organ continuo.

The fine recording was made in St. John's, Smith Square, London.

LINK

Ad in The Gramophone, September 1972