Review: With his first 'Missa Solemnis,' Gustavo Dudamel takes on Beethoven's ultimate spiritual challenge
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Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” is a grand mass for large orchestra, chorus and four vocal soloists that lasts around 80 minutes.It was written near the end of Beethoven’s life and is his most ambitious work musically and spiritually.
“Coming from the heart, may it go to the heart,” he wrote on the first page of the score.The Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford put it this way: “ ‘Missa Solemnis’ is Beethoven talking to God, man to man.And what they talked about is peace.
Creation was for Beethoven’s the magnificence in the world which we inhabit; ‘Missa Solemnis’ is meant to keep it thus.”Yet among Beethoven’s major works, “Missa Solemnis” is, by far, the least performed, and not merely because of the need for large forces.Conductors struggle to get a handle on its mysteries and intricacies.
Upon turning 70 last year, Simon Rattle contended “Missa Solemnis” remains beyond him.Upon his reaching 70, Michael Tilson Thomas made a momentous meal of “Missa Solemnis” 11 years ago with a staged performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall.Gustavo Dudamel, who has been conducting Beethoven since he was a teen, waited until he passed his 45th birthday last month.
His first “Missa Solemnis” performances over the weekend at Disney were the centerpiece of his month-long L.A.Phil focus on Beethoven.That venture began a week earlier with a political statement.
Beethoven’s incidental music to Goethe’s drama of liberation, “Egmont,” was updated with a new text that served as an urgent call for protest in our own era of authoritarianism and militarism.Here, Beethoven exerts a compulsion for triumphant glory.The glory in “Missa Solemnis” is that of stupefaction.
By this point in his life, Beethoven has had it with weapons, the drumbeat of soldiers, the addictive emotion of trumpet calls to action.His man-to-man ...