COMPOSERS: Hummel
LABELS: Chandos
ALBUM TITLE: Hummel - Mass in D minor
WORKS: Mass in D minor; Salve regina
PERFORMER: Susan Gritton (soprano), Rachel Nicholls(soprano), Pamela Helen Stephen(mezzo-soprano), Mark Padmore (tenor),Stephen Varcoe (baritone); CollegiumMusicum 90/Richard Hickox
CATALOGUE NO: CHAN 0724
A pupil of Mozart’s and variously
a friend and rival of Beethoven’s,
Johann Nepomuk Hummel was an
admired composer in his day, even
if history has consigned him to the
position of an interesting secondranker.
It was through Haydn’s
patronage that he obtained work
at the Esterházy court that saw
him adding to Haydn’s tradition
of composing a mass annually for
the nameday of Princess Marie
Ermengild Esterházy, of which this
is an example. The trouble is that
while Haydn produced a sequence
of masterpieces for the occasion,
and Beethoven (guest composer in
1807) his Mass in C, Hummel here
offers something skilled, graceful
and fluently crafted but rather
conventional. His fugues tend to
descend into note spinning.
Equally, the Salve Regina dating
from 1809 (in his notes David Wyn
Jones speculates that it may have
been composed as a memorial to
Haydn, who died that year) is an
amiable continuation of the Viennese
Classical tradition rather than a
renewal of it. But Susan Gritton sings
it with gusto, while she and the other
soloists form a well-blended quartet in
the Mass, whose performance under
Hickox is confident and shapely,
as well as delivered in warm, lucid
sound. George Hall