Beginning a concert that threw two very different works seemingly randomly together, Martyn Brabbins and his BBC forces blew the dust off the Missa de Santa Cecília by José Maurício Nunes Garcia – a pioneering composer you’ve probably never heard of, unless you were listening to BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week last October. A contemporary of Beethoven living in colonial Brazil, he was of mixed race and his grandparents had been enslaved, but he rose to become court composer to the Portuguese royal family in Rio de Janeiro.
His 1826 mass is a huge work that wears its influences clearly – Mozart, Haydn, a touch of the Italian bel canto that was so fashionable 6,000 miles away – and yet sounds distinctly his own. It’s mellower, warmer, more contented-sounding than its European models, and the music flows easily without ever sounding trite. Here, with the BBC Symphony Chorus making fine work of some gratifying choral writing, it sounded lovely, and also long: it lasts well over an hour, perhaps too long for this material in a concert-hall context.
Each of the four vocal soloists had a few minutes in the sun, suddenly flexing their virtuoso muscles in florid music before stepping back into the bigger picture again. The soprano Erika Baikoff and tenor Joshua Stewart rose to the challenges yet were a little underpowered in ensembles; the baritone Ross Ramgobin and mezzo Carris Jones, the latter jumping in at only a few hours’ notice, offered more solid vocal presence. What’s really striking about Nunes Garcia’s music is how focused he was on the woodwind – it’s the oboe, flute and especially clarinet who often get the best tunes, and the BBCSO’s wind soloists delivered beautifully.
Pairing the Mass with Pictures at an Exhibition worked better than one might have thought. Nunes Garcia had focused our ears on the woodwind; now Ravel, in his full-colour orchestration of Mussorgsky’s original piano piece, threw our attention all over the orchestra, from chattering trumpet to mournful saxophone to faraway muted horns. Brabbins drew the work to a rousing close with a glowing depiction of the Great Gate of Kyiv, with an impressively tolling stage bell making the walls ring all around.
