Making sense of the provenance of Profil's Gounod: Messe Solennelle de Sainte-Cecile for purposes of this review was quite a task, but here is the scoop: the recording was made in 1996 for the long-lived but by now certifiably defunct German company Calig. This reissue is by a company that, by its full name, is Profil Edition -- Günter Hänssler, the same Günter Hänssler who founded Hänssler Classics, although he is no longer affiliated with the last-named concern in any way. Now that this is out of the way, it can be said that Gounod: Messe Solennelle de Sainte-Cecile is an album well worthy of reissue, making available better than merely acceptable performances of two nineteenth century French sacred works of potentially broad appeal that have heretofore garnered little attention in terms of recordings.
While
Charles Gounod's Messe Solennelle de Sainte-Cecile might seem an awfully specialized taste for contemporary palates, in its time it was very mainstream, being written by France's top Catholic composer in a style heavily influenced by Italian models. Not long before writing Messe Solennelle de Sainte-Cecile,
Gounod had experienced an epiphany in regards to old, historic music and in particular the work of Giovanni Palestrina. This translates into choral writing that is straightforward and lacking in the slippery chromatics one readily associates with nineteenth century German music. This keeps this mass setting sounding fresh, unfettered, and swiftly moving even though it runs in excess of 40 minutes. Bizet's Te Deum is shorter, and as it was composed when Bizet was just 19 years of age, it does demonstrate some rough edges. Nevertheless, it also has a lot of character built into it, and both works have properties of attractive harmonic coloring in various places that do not come as foregone conclusions. This Calig recording is thus far the only one of Bizet's Te Deum, and it makes for a very complimentary discmate to the
Gounod.
The performance by the Münchner MotettenChor and
Münchner Symphoniker is very good, and captured in a warm acoustical environment, the only drawback being that the solo singers appear a little off mike, or at least not loud enough in the mix versus the instruments. The original Calig release would have been saddled with the dual economic disadvantage of being both ridiculously expensive and impossible to find; this Profil re-release should be easily obtainable, and reasonably satisfying, to anyone who desires to experience these relatively rare French nineteenth century sacred works.