I loved Leonard Bernstein's Mass when I first heard Bernstein's recording of it in the early 1970's. Unfortunately it didn't age will with me: years later I found many of the frequent stylistic juxtapositions forced and the musical-style numbers dated. So I was very interested in Kent Nagano's new recording for Harmonia Mundi.
Nagano's reading is a revelation. I came away with a renewed interest in Bernstein as a composer, if not as a conductor. (As an old music teacher of mine said, don't rely on recordings and performances made by the composer of a score.) Nagano unifies the whole complex work with clean, brisk tempos that have well-defined relationships between sections. Jerry Hadley uses his profound skill to realize the central role of Celebrant as never happened before in Bernstein's recording; in that earlier recording, Alan Titus sings emotionally but variably. Hadley never loses sight of the overall work. His reading of the closing Fraction is amazing.
Instrumental playing is uniformly clean: I heard instrumental textures that I'd never heard in Bernstein's own recording. The choral singing is good, but the English diction is weak, especially in some of the pop sequences.
If you're interested in revisiting a 1970's period piece, I'd highly recommend this recording.
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