This three-CD set from Harmonia Mundi purports on the packaging to offer "the finest masses in musical history." Of course that's an impossible goal, and the liner notes back off from it with various disclaimers. The question to ask about a set like this, assembled from existing Harmonia Mundi releases going back to 1986, is whether it either gives a usable overview of the form it examines (similar Harmonia Mundi series cover other genres) or adds some unusual perspective that a listener buying a group of individual CDs ...
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This three-CD set from Harmonia Mundi purports on the packaging to offer "the finest masses in musical history." Of course that's an impossible goal, and the liner notes back off from it with various disclaimers. The question to ask about a set like this, assembled from existing Harmonia Mundi releases going back to 1986, is whether it either gives a usable overview of the form it examines (similar Harmonia Mundi series cover other genres) or adds some unusual perspective that a listener buying a group of individual CDs might miss, or both. The answer here is partially yes on both counts. The performances, many of them drawn from Harmonia Mundi's deep bench of fine early music ensembles, mostly can't be faulted, and the catholic (not Catholic) instincts of the compilers result in a varied collection of mass music with some distinctive surprises (the Kyrie of the Jean Richafort Requiem, for example) along with landmark works from Machaut, Josquin, Bach, Mozart (the Credo and Sanctus-Benedictus of the...
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