Biber: Missa Salisburgensis

Salzburg has long been an essential place of pilgrimage for fans of Mozart and The Sound of Music. Yet the Austrian city’s musical credentials were forged centuries before the birth of both, cultivated since medieval times and enhanced in the 1600s with extravagant works for big bands of instruments and voices. And none was more extravagant than the Missa Salisburgensis. Almost certainly composed by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Salzburg’s deputy Kapellmeister at the time of the work’s first performance in 1682, its score remained buried in the archives until it was rediscovered and published almost 200 years later. Biber’s monumental Mass was written for a combined force of 53 players and singers. It had to wait until the final decades of the last century before receiving its first high-profile recordings. The most convincing was the spectacular version made in 1997 for Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv label by the Gabrieli Consort & Players and Musica Antiqua Köln, under the direction of Paul McCreesh and Reinhard Goebel. Their Missa Salisburgensis, remastered in 2022 in Spatial Audio, includes parts for solo voices, two choirs comprising 16 singers, sundry Baroque strings and winds, eight trumpets and kettledrums, a pair of high-flying clarino trumpets, three sackbuts, two cornetts and four organs. “It’s an extraordinary piece—the archetypal Counter-Reformation composition,” McCreesh tells Apple Music. “And it makes a colossal sound!” The work, he explains, was written to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the foundation of the bishopric of Salzburg by St Rupert, an occasion apt for fielding the city’s company of court- and field-trumpeters as well as the highly skilled musicians of St Peter’s and Salzburg’s Baroque cathedral. “There are one or two things about the structure of the composition which I find perplexing,” adds McCreesh, “but I think it works well if you accept it for what it is: a big statement piece. We made no apologies for performing it with rea