Jerry Hadley, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Kent Nagano - Leonard Bernstein: Mass (2012)

I am not an automatic fan of composer-led recordings, even when the composer is as great a conductor as Leonard Bernstein. However, after living with this newcomer for a while, I have to confess that it doesn’t quite match that classic version, even though it does a few things even better. On the plus side, there’s Kent Nagano’s swift and perky direction of some of the music-theater numbers, such as “God Said”, “World Without End”, and in general all of the music in and around the Gloria. But this can be a two-edged sword: The mechanized Credo has less impact than it could; a very quick tempo at the opening of the Agnus Dei prevents the chorus from ever sounding really angry and demanding; and the calamitous Dona Nobis Pacem simply lacks the bluesy sleaze that Bernstein himself wrings out of it. A slower tempo also would have allowed the music’s many layers to register with greater clarity.

As for the singing, the soloists of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, however unlikely the name, certainly match (and in some cases outclass) their premiere-recording counterparts. “If I Could, I’d Confess” sounds particularly wicked. Jerry Hadley, as the celebrant, is a good music-theater singer (possibly better at that now than as an operatic tenor), and he hams it up nicely in his big mad scene at the end. He sounds as though he’s enjoying himself. Still, he’s no match for Alan Titus in sheer beauty of tone or lung power. Titus also brings a certain dynamism and virility to the role that makes his final emotional collapse all the more devastating and believable. Bernstein’s original “street chorus” has it all over the Pacific Mozart Ensemble as a unit, but the children’s choir sounds terrific.

Bernstein’s own recording hardly was a sonic masterpiece–studio bound and “in your face”–and this new version, apparently recorded live, judging from some minor audience noises, replaces the old problems with some new ones. I like the distance that the hall ambience lends to the taped segments, but I don’t appreciate the loss of detail, which seems to me excessive. Similarly, in the Kyrie and other heavily scored passages the orchestra simply drowns out the chorus–hardly a word is audible. As noted above, slightly less frantic tempos might have increased the comprehensibility, but the problem is fundamentally one of balance. The basic sound, though, is warm and natural, although some of the amplified voices stick out a bit.

Even with these caveats, if you love Bernstein’s Mass, you should hear this performance. It’s very exciting for the most part, and it carries a great deal of conviction. Beyond that, for subsequent performances Bernstein made numerous changes to his original version, thinning out the orchestration a bit and altering tone colors, and so this recording not only is sonically different from Bernstein’s, it’s also different textually and therefore is eminently worth investigating on that count alone. I can very easily imagine some listeners preferring this version on the whole, even with minor quibbles here and there about certain aspects of the interpretation. In the end, this is an important release because it validates the ongoing vitality of what arguably is Bernstein’s largest and most important work. We should be grateful to Harmonia Mundi for letting us hear it.