German-born but Italian trained, Simon Mayr was in his early fifties when he turned in earnest to the composition of sacred music. Among his many offerings are six Requiems, 20 Requiem movements and no fewer than 111 pieces for the Office of the Dead. Based in Bergamo, just north of Milan, he was clearly the go-to man when it came to the provision of musical obsequies for the great and the good of Lombardy.

A Requiem Mass by him, published in Milan in 1819, has long been known about. This new recording offers us a rather more lavishly appointed setting, probably written for an event in Bergamo four years earlier. Made up of 22 separate movements, it
has been assembled from 12 previously unexamined manuscripts – two of them the work of Mayr’s pupil Donizetti – which are currently housed in Bergamo’s Civico Biblioteca Angelo Mai.

Since it was the irresistible rise of Rossini that largely put paid to Mayr’s operatic career, it is interesting to note that when Ferdinand Hiller asked Rossini about Mayr’s ‘powers of invention’ in 1855, Rossini deftly sidestepped the question, preferring instead to praise Mayr’s skills as an orchestrator and his role as ‘the first Italian composer to show to advantage the dramatic dimension’.

That might well have been the case in the theatre (Rossini much admired Mayr’s Medea in Corinto) but it’s certainly not the case with this treatment of the Requiem text. Almost entirely bereft of serious engagement with the drama of Last Things, it reveals Mayr burbling away, as was often his wont, amiably and at length. A more irrepressibly cheerful set of Requiem movements you would be hard-pressed to find.

A more contemplative mood does occasionally break in, as in the soprano’s lovely ‘Quid sum miser’ or the tenor-led ‘Preces meae’, though the latter is Donizetti’s work, not Mayr’s. (Would one have guessed? The lie and shape of the vocal line is a possible clue.) There are times too when Mayr suddenly remembers his Mozart, which helps.

What is genuinely cheering about the set is the affection that Franz Hauk and his mainly Bavarian forces clearly have for the music of their fellow countryman. The performance has style and panache, and the recording is first-rate.