★★★★☆ Sensitive, nuanced reading of Beethoven’s massive choral masterpiece.

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall
August 26, 2016

The Missa solemnis took Beethoven four years to complete. It was intended for the ceremony at which his friend and patron Rudolph, Archduke of Austria, was to be sworn in as Archbishop in 1820; Beethoven missed the deadline by three years. By the time it was completed in 1823, just four years before his death, Beethoven had been completely deaf for at least half a decade. Like many of his late works, it is regarded as fiendishly demanding and unorthodox, complicated further in this case by Beethoven’s relationship with Christianity, which was not straightforward. Profound and searching, the Missa solemnis is steeped in earlier religious choral traditions, which Beethoven studied intensely in preparation for its composition – masses and/or oratorios by Palestrina, Bach, Handel and Haydn particularly – and he once described it as “my greatest work”.

No pressure then, for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with conductor Sir Andrew Davis, “to communicate to the audience the spiritual immensity and splendour” of the Missa solemnis, “as well as the questioning of man’s place in the picture,” as Davis himself put it. Sometimes...