In the plethora of Mozart recordings of recent years, the church music has been largely overlooked, a few major works apart. So EMI's current campaign—as it seems to be—to redress the balance is warmly welcome. This particular disc, however, seems to me a mixed success. Is, I wonder, King's College Chapel in Cambridge an appropriate recording location for these works? And are the chapel choir well suited to such repertory? The lengthy reverberation—quite different from that of the very large but acoustically 'cleaner' cathedral at Salzburg, and far greater than that of St Peter's Abbey there, a better analogue for Mozart's music—often blunts the texture, and at Mozart's occasional dramatic pauses it even threatens to demand a disruption of the rhythm. That, combined with the soft-toned King's boys, and with English countertenor timbre, produces a rather sluggish effect. I don't suppose it sounded that way in the chapel during the recordings, but on this CD the performances sometimes seem lustreless and enervated. Tempos in the choruses are not very brisk, as a rule, but in these circumstances I don't see how it could have been otherwise. Stephen Cleobury does not, I feel, impart much of vitality, and I am not sure that he is really at home with the spirit of Austrian catholicism of the classical period.
Nor do the soloists, clear and accurate as they are, offer much warmth of expression. The fact that Mozart's and Haydn's church music is often (even if not quite truthfully) dubbed 'operatic' might perhaps have given them a clue as to the proper style. The busiest of the soloists by far is the soprano, Lynne Dawson. The fine ring of her voice through the texture never fails to thrill, and she does her two solo numbers, the ''Laudate dominum'' settings, with some distinction—the first is a pretty A major piece with some demanding coloratura, and the second, the famous one that is often given separately, she does coolly and serenely, with crystalline tone. It is lovely, though you may prefer (as I do) performances with a shade more of obvious emotion. Well, for all the reservations, there is still a lot of pleasure to be had from the disc, in the clean and stylish string playing, and of course in the music itself, which has many interesting things and appealing ideas, as well as a couple of tours de force of counterpoint in the ''Laudate pueri'' settings, full of fugue and canon.
The Ave verum corpus is well done, though it seems curious to dish up this little sweetmeat here it is wholly unrelated to Vespers settings—when they might have done the K193/186g Dixit and Magnificat and thus have provided Mozart's entire output of Vespers music in one compact package.'