Music

Dunedin Consort

Perth Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

A GROUP that dealt with the pandemic lockdown by hiring its own boat to return home across the English Channel was not likely to have its plans damaged too much by a national holiday for Monday’s State Funeral of The Queen.

While most of the singers and players of the Dunedin Consort were kicking their heels in a largely closed Perth that day, their planned performance of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor went ahead 24 hours later, the delayed start of a week’s residency at the venue when Professor John Butt’s group will record the work for the Linn label.

It is an important project for the ensemble, because it follows a Grammy-award-nominated disc of the same composer’s Requiem and uses a new edition of the score prepared by Amsterdam-based musicologist Clemens Kemme published five years ago.

The Requiem was left unfinished at the composer’s death, but the incomplete nature of the earlier C Minor Mass is less easily explained – the most prosaic being that there was little earning potential in it for the newly-wed Mozart.

In the hands of Butt and the Dunedin, however, it is revealed as a fascinating work, with elements looking back to early models in the work of Purcell and Handel and others very much up-to-date and in the style of his more lucrative opera work, with one aria, the Marian hymn Et incarnatus est, likely written specifically for his wife Constanza to sing.

Soprano Lucy Crowe, who did that, was in glorious voice on Tuesday evening, as was Anna Dennis, who had the first solo, Laudemus te, which requires a darker voice, with her rich lower tones. When the pair combined, the effect was superb.

Much of the vocal score is choral, however, with the ten singers combining in distinct ways, and each one having a distinct role. Although they had performed the work at the end of the Lammermuir Festival, there was some hesitancy in the stage positioning here, and it took a bar or two of the opening Kyrie for the choir to assert itself, but it is already clear from this public rehearsal that the recording is likely to be something special.

That is as much because of the two dozen or so instrumentalists behind them, whose precision playing on Baroque instruments gives full expression to the work Kemme has done to flesh out the orchestral sketches the composer made.

To demonstrate just how good the Dunedin band is, Butt preceded the Mass with Haydn’s Symphony No 80, played by just 18 musicians. It was a demonstration, even after many years of “historically informed performance”, just how revelatory such an approach can be.