Anton Bruckner |Mass in F Minor

When the clergyman Peter Kohlgraf succeeded the extremely popular Bishop of Mainz Cardinal Karl Lehmann in 2017, he requested a performance of Anton Bruckner’s F minor Mass by Domkapellmeister Karsten Storck and his musicians. This CD is a live recording of the concert on 29 April 2018, about which the critic from the Allgemeine Zeitung Mainz wrote: it was “filled with moments of a heavenly beauty of sound. Choir and orchestra melded into a captivating cosmos in whose heavens the soloists with their radiant voices shone like stars.” The solo quartet consisting of Jutta Hörl (soprano), Gudrun Pelker (alto), Thorsten Büttner (tenor) and Derrick Ballard (bass) throw Bruckner’s impressively realized drama into relief, together with the lavish vocal forces of the Mädchenchor am Dom und St. Quintin (girls’ choir), the St. Martin’s cathedral choir, and the male voices of the Mainzer Domchor (boys’ choir) and the cathedral orchestra. Moving transcendence is brought together here with powerful sound, reflecting the composer’s unshakable faith in symphonic thought as a means of proclamation, and reaffirming Bruckner to be, as he became known, “God’s own musician”.