Updated 11.18.09

This mass, commissioned and performed by the superb 12-man American group Chanticleer, begins and ends with Plainsong, and is comprised of five movements by five different composers interspersed with shorter pieces by Andrea Gabrieli and Carlo Gesualdo. Douglas J. Cuomo’s Kyrie features the extreme ends of the men’s vocal ranges and plays plainsong against tonal clusters; the Turkish composer Kamran Ince’s Gloria is sung to a Sufi text and radiates peace; Shulamit Ran’s Credo, in her native Hebrew and English, begins in a stunning martial outburst about the belief in one God and uses texts that relate to the Holocaust (occasionally spoken) to make her dramatic points; London-born Ivan Moody contributes a ravishing, medieval-tinged Sanctus, as ethereally lovely  — and at points as stunningly wild — as his compositions for Trio Mediaeval; and the Irish composer Michael McGlynn’s Agnus Dei begins as a solo in Gaelic, which is then underpinned with a drone in the darker voices and it ends, with grace, at a whisper. Perhaps the boldest music here is the Gesualdo, whose bizarre harmonies and discordances still can shock and awe, but the Chanticleer Mass, while not an overwhelming new work, is nonetheless, fascinating, and, as one might imagine, beautifully performed.

— Robert Levine (Amazon.com)

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