Johannes Michel, Deutsche Naturhornsolisten - La Fête de Saint Hubert (Masses for Saint Hubert) (2009)

This downright strange release from the German audiophile label MDG is highly recommended, especially if you have either a brass player or a stereo equipment aficionado on your gift list. What, you may wonder, is a Mass for Saint Hubert, and why is there no choir listed on the cover of the album? The booklet notes don't fully answer these questions, but the basic point is that hunters (whose patron saint is Hubert), in France specifically, sometimes celebrated mass in the open air while on a hunt led by the king or another noble figure, and the music on such occasions was played by hunting horns. Exactly how this evolved in the nineteenth century into an in-church celebration, with organ accompaniment, isn't exactly clear, but what you'll hear here are multimovement pieces for an ensemble of giant horns with organ, with each movement corresponding at least nominally to a section of the mass. There are no texts whatsoever, and the style of all of it necessarily includes a lot of tonic triads. But the music, while minimal, isn't monotonous if you get yourself into the right frame of mind; variety comes from reductions in the horn forces and from other alterations in the big stacks of pure sound of which the music consists. There is one section, marked Domine or Domine salvam, that is common to these pieces and others in the tradition. Perhaps those who have concerned themselves with the history of hunting in Europe will know this music, but for most others it will be new and extremely unusual. There's little word in the booklet on where and when and why music like this would have been performed, or on who the composers, including the mysteriously single-named Tyndare (who alone among the composers introduces glorious bell effects), might have been. And, to make it all a little more arcane, the music heard here is not in its original form, but has been transposed from D major to E flat major and adapted from the original setting for the French trompe de chasse to new versions for a German instrument called the Parforcehorn. It hardly matters once MDG's crack team of engineers gets rolling and captures the sound of the Deutsche Naturhorn Solisten resonating off the walls of Mannheim's Christuskirche , an ideal venue that lends results the listener may well appreciate in direct proportion to the cost of his/her stereo equipment. Even on a squeakbox, however, this music is quite an experience.