Beethoven: Missa Solemnis Op.123

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LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis Op.123
Elisabeth Soderstrom, Marga Hoffgen, Martti Talvela / New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

[ Warner Classics Original Jacket Reissues / CD ]

Release Date: Monday 20 April 2015

This item is only available to us via Special Import.

Few musical works express man's metaphysical aspirations more powerfully than Beethoven's titanic Missa Solemnis. As Otto Klemperer wrote some years before making this recording: "It is enormously difficult to translate into reality a work which doesn't take reality into account." He had first conducted the Missa Solemnis in 1927 and it came to define the epic grandeur of his interpretative style.

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"..a recording that must take its place on the heights among the greatest recordings of our time."
(Gramophone)

"The glory of Klemperer's set is the superb choral singing of the new Philharmonia Chorus." (Penguin Guide)

"This 1965 recording of Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus embodies everything that's great about the Missa Solemnis. And everything that's great about late Beethoven is in the Missa Solemnis: the energy, the nobility, the strength, the vision, and -- above all -- the overwhelming sense that the numinous is imminent. Beethoven thought it was his best work and who could not agree? That's what's in Klemperer's performance. His command of the score and control of the orchestra are complete, but it is Klemperer's ability to take the musicians beyond themselves, to go beyond making music to be made music, and to incarnate Beethoven's transcendent revelation in sound that puts this recording in a class of its own. Or rather, that puts it in the same exalted class as Klemperer's German Requiem and St. Matthew Passion, the class of the sublime. EMI's stereo sound was magnificent in its day and its remastering is ideal.' (AllMusic.com)