The new Naxos recording is a welcome addition to the discography of this work. What I liked the most about this recording is how unabashedly un-operatic it is. I was not prepared to how much I was going to like the performance, nor for the emotional impact the performance was going to have on me. I was also surprised at how easy to listen it was. Before I could even think about it, I was in track 19! …Listening to this performance didn’t feel like a chore. I happily went back for a second listening.

Leading the pack is Marin Alsop, who has crafted a balance of the serious and the profane that gives this recording a contemporary feel. How many pieces can you name that still feel fresh nearly 40 years after their premiere? It simply does not feel old; it sounds modern, relevant, fierce.

Honor place must go to the Baltimore Symphony for their excellent playing. The orchestral meditations are played beautifully, but so it the rest of the piece. They provide the singers with a fantastic cushion of sound to work their magic; and work their magic they do. The Mass is a bitch to learn and perform for the chorus. At the end of the performance you just want to sit on a bath and soak, ’cause you are sore as all hell.

Morgan State and their students should be very proud of their chorus. They not only sounded fabulous, but the music is performed with accuracy and spirit. Bravo to all the chorus members for their fabulous effort. Big bravo also to the Peabody Children’s Choir. Their work in appropriately described as angelic, specially in the Sanctus.

I think one of the issues that the earlier generation had with the Mass, besides the irreverent tone, is the fact that it is hard to classify. Is it classical? Is it Broadway? It certainly has elements of both and one of the ones that sticks like a sore thumb is the many small roles that call for singers to do everything their teachers told them not to do.

Naxos has outdone themselves in casting singers that fill these parts with fierce determination…In the center of this and any Mass is the priest, or the celebrant. I have come to realize that you need a good baritenor or a belter for the role—a Ted Neeley of sorts, someone who just sings without thinking of how this F is placed, or how am I going to hit this Ab here. This is a role that requires guts and the ability to leap into the abyss without much fear.

I think casting Jubilant Sykes as the celebrant was a stroke of genius on Naxos’ part. His singing is beautiful and polished. It is not a perfect performance, here and there are signs that he had to work hard to reach some of the higher notes in the score, but he does what many would expect: he leaves the “serious baritone” sound behind and delves into the character’s descent into doubt convincingly.

Let’s be honest here, the Celebrant is not a traditional baritone role, even less a serious one. Sykes is obviously a trained baritone, but his interest in jazz and his experience singing gospel makes him almost perfect for the role; you get the burnish sound of a baritone with the mind of someone who knows when to let go and use tricks from a different bag to create a portrayal that is convincing and that carries a huge emotional impact.

His “Simple Song” is, as needed, simple, beautifully vocalized. As the character is beset with doubts, Sykes proved how intelligent a singer he is by gradually leaving behind the operatic sound and using a more pop sound culminating in a riveting anger scene.

In summary, Naxos has brought together a fabulous performance that transcends whatever blemishes you might find along the way. I think this performance should be in any Bernstein’s fan’s library. I am glad it somehow made it into mine and I am sure this recording will bring me many hours of enjoyment.

RECORDING OF THE MONTH

This fantastic set is a true revelation. Before sitting down to listen to these discs I had only ever read about Bernstein’s Mass and the comments were universally disparaging. Alsop’s eye-opening performance shows it to be what it is: a genuinely daring attempt to fuse a huge mix of musical genres into a theatre piece which explores faith and doubt, loss and gain, and pulling it off remarkably successfully.

Mass was written in response to a commission from Jackie Kennedy Onassis for a work to open the new John F. Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. Bernstein wrote of the commission, “I’ve always wanted to compose a service of one sort or another, and I toyed with ecumenical services that would combine elements from various religions…The Mass is also an extremely dramatic event in itself—it even suggests a theatre work.” Mass is indeed a theatre work. The Latin text serves as a framework around which to orientate the lives of various characters and groups. At the centre is the celebrant himself who begins by articulating his “simple song” to God but goes through a crisis of faith, smashing the holy vessels towards the end, before he is rehabilitated by the simplicity of belief in the final moments. Elsewhere the congregation, known as the Street People, spend most of the work questioning whether there is any merit to the mass at all: during the Credo a Rock band answers with the words “I believe in God / but does God believe in me? I’ll believe in any god / if any god there be” and elsewhere “and then a plaster god like you has the gall to tell me what to do.”

Bernstein was right: it’s a tremendously dramatic journey, thanks in part to the additional lyrics provided by Wunderkind Stephen Schwartz, fresh from his triumph in Godspell. Bernstein provides music that positively thumps with energy, encompassing classical, jazz, rock and blues, as well as some traditional Jewish elements. With all of this you would think that Mass should be a rag-tag mix of genres without much to keep it together, but in a performance like this you are instantly impressed with the undeniable unity of the piece.

The playing is fantastic from everyone. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conjure up the cacophonous racket of the Kyrie as if it was Stockhausen but demonstrate great beauty in the first Meditation and the touching simplicity of the final Pax section. The marching band, rock group and jazz ensemble are all given absolutely equal weighting—no sense of hierarchy in this most catholic of Catholic masses—and they all play tremendously. The zany marching music that accompanies the first entrance of the Street People is chaotic and lawless, the antithesis of all that the military march stands for, and guitarists for the jazz and rock elements burst onto the senses with sometimes disconcerting suddenness, jolting the listener up in his seat and forcing him to pay more attention.

The singing is fantastic too. Jubilant Sykes’ Celebrant has a fantastically appropriate voice for this music, dark and rich but sexy too, with more than a hint of danger. He just sounds so right for this role: I can’t imagine anyone better placed to play the role of the preacher turned heretic and his is one of the finest musical portrayals I’ve come across this year. The sense of gathering uncertainty is palpable throughout the performance, from the beautiful simplicity of the opening, though to the experimental confidence of the Sanctus—“Mi alone is only me, but me with sol, me with soul, means a song is beginning.” He is gut-wrenching at the depth of his doubt but wonderfully positive in his final rehabilitation, making me feel like I had gone on the journey with him. His Street People, the Morgan State University Choir, are far from being backing singers. They have an energy and thrill to them that you naturally associate with the Jets and Sharks in West Side Story (the “Sermon” section reminded me a lot of Gee, Officer Krupke) and each solo contribution is distinctly characterised so as to create a feeling of community falling apart but ultimately growing together again.

The recording engineers have done a fantastic job in capturing the many different acoustics needed for this work: no less than ten times a pre-recorded taped performance is needed, and the ear is jolted into an entirely different space for those in comparison to the “live” performance. They also use the full stereo arc to maximum effect so as to distinguish between the different characters and performers.

Highest praise of all must go to Alsop, however. Having once been Bernstein’s pupil she has now become the most convincing advocate on disc for this previously problematic work. She holds together every strand of this endlessly diverse score, welding it into a convincing musical and dramatic whole. This is perhaps her greatest recording to date, and I don’t doubt that she would say it’s the one closest to her heart.

Added to all this is an excellent booklet essay by Robert Hilferty and full sung texts. At Naxos super-budget price you can afford to check this out without much risk. It may be the cheapest Mass on the market but it’s also by far the best. Do not hesitate.

It’s always a pleasure to find a new CD that I can wholeheartedly endorse, and here we have one that is indispensable: Marin Alsop’s recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Bernstein’s so-called “Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers” purposely crossed genres, as a result of which it has always resided somewhere outside the musical theatre classification. And as a result of which, many fans of musical theatre—and fans of Bernstein as well—have more or less overlooked it. Imagine, another score to keep on the shelf alongside West Side Story and Candide—and many Bernstein fans don’t know it? That has been the fate of Mass, alas; Bernstein’s excellent 1971 recording of the score has always been around, more or less, but usually grouped with his symphonic work and relatively undiscovered by Broadwayites. Here we have a sparkling new two-disc recording, available from the relatively low-priced Naxos label. No excuses, please; if you consider yourself a fan of Bernstein and don’t know Mass, now is the time to discover it. And if you know and enjoy your Mass, you’ll no doubt be thrilled by this new recording.

Mass, of course, is the piece that was commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis in 1966 for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The grand premiere at the Opera House on Sept. 8, 1971, just across the street from the Watergate, arrived under storm clouds; Bernstein’s pop-rock, anti-war version of a Catholic mass contained elements seemingly designed to offend anyone over 30 who wasn’t exceedingly liberal. Certainly, the President who inherited it—Mr Nixon—must have seen it as an enormous stick poked in his eye (although he apparently stayed away from the 12-performance engagement). “O you people of power, your hour is now, you may plan to rule forever, but you never do somehow”; this might have been seen as a direct joust in those pre-Watergate days. Mass, which was directed by Gordon Davidson and choreographed by Alvin Ailey, then moved on to a three-week stint at the Metropolitan Opera House. Too big for a Broadway theatre, with almost 250 performers and musicians, but not exactly welcome in higher-brow environs. That turned out to be the fate of the piece.

Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, knows Bernstein well; a protégé of the master, she has had considerable success with his work. As a major keeper of the flame, she undertook a grand concert version of Mass last October (her fifth time conducting the piece). This traveled to Carnegie Hall as part of last fall’s Bernstein Festival; the performance on Oct. 24 was decidedly a highlight of my entire theatregoing season.

Ms Alsop does a phenomenal job; she has clearly studied Bernstein’s recording, and effortlessly inhabits the score. But she enhances the piece; certain tempos are altered in a manner that heightens the emotion and adds an element of danger. The impression, beginning midway through, is of a watch-spring being wound tighter and tighter. Alsop retains control, but then the score seems to sneak away from her until—finally—the spring is twisted too tight. It breaks and unravels with a clang. This is, of course, precisely what happens in the piece; the Celebrant carefully and valiantly holds on as his faith is bombarded on all sides. Finally, though, “things get broken.” The Celebrant’s breakdown is mirrored, as it were, from the podium, resulting in a Mass that absolutely soars and startles.

Bernstein, who conducted Mass for the original recording [CBS M2K 44593] but not in the theatre, seems to be running on adrenaline. He couldn’t have been especially familiar with the score when he took everybody next door to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall for the recording sessions, struggling as he was to finish the writing. (Certain portions of the text have always sounded like dummy lyrics which never got replaced. Stephen Schwartz, who as a 23-year-old newcomer collaborated with Bernstein on the lyrics, appears to have recently fixed up some of these spots at Alsop’s behest.) It is foolish to opine as to how Bernstein would respond to what Alsop has wrought, but I’m inclined to think that he would heartily and vehemently approve, with hugs all around.

What raises this Mass above all others is the presence of Jubilant Sykes as The Celebrant. Alan Titus, who originated the role back in 1971, was very good indeed; but Sykes not only sings this massive part, he acts it. Listening to this recording, you get a sense of the Celebrant as a character; Mass is his journey from religious exaltation to a dark and crushing despair. We can hear the Celebrant of Mr Sykes thinking as he goes along—and fighting the thoughts, which distract him from the religious service. He is wound tighter and tighter, like the aforementioned watch-spring, as he progresses from “The Lord’s Prayer” to “I Go On” to the “Sanctus”; and his ultimate breakdown, in “Things Get Broken,” is simply devastating. Sykes, with the support and assent of Alsop, brings humanity to Bernstein’s Mass; and that is the extra magic of this recording.

Alsop leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Morgan State University Choir, and the Peabody Children’s Chorus. Nobody bothers to credit orchestrators Jonathan Tunick and Hershy Kay, so I’ll do that here. Bernstein knew what he wanted in this piece, certainly, but he didn’t have the time or presumably the inclination to do it himself. (I understand that the composer sheepishly apologized when their names were omitted from the 1971 recording.) And while the 20-person Street Chorus is listed in alphabetical order, none of the soloists are delineated. Thus let me point out that “I Don’t Know” is sung by Timothy Shew and Dan Micciche; “Thank You” (“There once were days so bright”) is sung by Amy Justman; “Non Credo” (“And was made man”) is sung by Kevin Vortmann; Morgan James does “Hurry”; and Max Perlman leads “I Believe in God.” Most special of all is Theresa McCarthy, the soloist for “World Without End.” (Street Chorus members without major solos include Sarah Uriate Berry.)

But it is Ms Alsop, and Mr Sykes, who take this worthy “theatre piece for singers, players and dancers” and give us an even finer recording than Mr Bernstein’s original. Those of you who have been missing out on this score for years be prepared for the reward of this thrilling Mass.

Every once in a while, a big piece of music comes along that is so compelling that it defies being treated as background music. Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is one of those works. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and premiered on Sept. 8, 1971, this 105-minute mix of sacred and secular, music and theatre, opera and oratorio, classical and pop, should be considered as one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. This new, two-CD recording by a cast of hundreds gives Mass its full due. The main singing role, a priest who loses his faith and then finds it again, is magnificently sung by baritone Jubilant Sykes. The same holds true for the rest of the singers—the Morgan State University Choir, the Peabody Children’s Chorus and sweet-voiced boy soprano Asher Edward Wulfman. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, augmented by guitar and percussion, finds the right cutting edge under Marin Alsop’s baton. Bernstein (who died in 1990), teamed up with then-20-something Broadway composer (and Wicked creator) Stephen Schwartz. You can tell that they worked in the afterglow of Woodstock and the shadows of the Vietnam War—a battle between light and dark, good and evil, that continues to this day. Thanks to this great recording, Mass can connect with us as viscerally today as it did 38 years ago.

Marin Alsop takes on Bernstein’s Mass and emerges triumphant

To all the naysayers, bug-eyed sceptics and disapproving doubting Thomases, listen up: a third apostle has spoken.

If Leonard Bernstein’s own 1971 recording of his Mass (yes, italics—it’s a “Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers”, not a setting of the liturgy) is Gospel, Marin Alsop is the latest disciple to evangelise Bernstein’s most ecstatic, charismatic and sanctified music. Compared to the intellectual fence-sitting and crackerbarrel mysticism that—since Holy Minimalism became the latest must-have lifestyle soundtrack—is every place, Bernstein’s relationship with God is dangerous, probing, transformational. There are those, of course, who proffer that Bernstein thought he was God, that’s why he could stand in defiance against Him. But, no—Mass reveals a man thirsting for faith but petrified of blind acceptance. Bernstein’s religion was muscular and intellectualised, and the experience of Mass expands, rather than contracts, the further you travel towards the essence of its cosmology.

When Kent Nagano brought down the tablets of stone in 2003, frankly, he dropped some. Jerry Hadley sang the anchoring role of the Celebrant with obedient accuracy but lacked the lusty, unselfconscious mania with which Alan Titus sexed up Bernstein’s account. Released earlier this year, Randall Scarlata in Kristjan Jarvi’s performance preached with soul and fervour: but Alsop’s Jubilant Sykes is the best of all possible Celebrants.

There can be few roles in contemporary music theatre that demand so many sides of a performer. The Celebrant is a near-constant presence on stage throughout the just-short-of-two-hour duration. He must disentangle music of gnarly complexity (“The Word of the Lord”), and bringing appropriate sincerity to writing that could slide towards doe-eyed naivety (“Simple Song“). “The Lord’s Prayer”, segueing into “I Go On”, needs an operatic sensibility, while the Celebrant must also swing like a hipster jazzer and declaim with authentic rockist swank.

And those are just the technical riders. Mass follows the Celebrant to the darkest place a proselytiser for faith can travel—from sneaking doubt towards a full-scale breakdown as, in Bernstein’s climactic scene, he trashes the altar and sends the sacraments scattering. Sykes brings an intensity that chills. In his joy is pain; in the agony of his crack-up is hope that does, indeed, ultimately blossom. His voice shakes with James Brown’s ecstasy, snarls with Janis Joplin-like indigence and projects through the labyrinth of Bernstein’s tricky melodic contours like any trained voice would. Sykes was born to play this part.

The stage action was Bernstein’s parable for 1970s America; an America fighting a controversial war, ravaged by political and racial conflict, and the assassination of anybody who was a force for good. To portray a society in freefall, Bernstein illuminates all its music. At the beginning vocal and percussive fragments leer at the audience from out of quadraphonic speakers like latter-day Ives, and musical modernity breaks out everywhere. An atonal oboe solo sounds like calculated blasphemy, stretching chromatic choral fragments leave singers grasping free-for-all notes in aleatoric freak-outs; tonality gets refracted through tone-rows and clusters. Over this shifting abstraction, Bernstein layers church music, blues, jazz, even a brief quote from Beethoven. This is our world now, Bernstein proclaims: no place for art that thinks it knows itself.

Just as the Celebrant flips comes the most remarkable passage of all—a funky 10-bar refrain of “Dona nobis pacem” which is reiterated deliriously as blues singers improvise added lines and, eventually, the orchestra is invited to holler above “anything from the entire musical literature”. Although she doesn’t drive things quite as far as Bernstein, Alsop ensures this passage pushes the Celebrant over the top and Sykes’s portrayal of the breakdown is moving and sensitive; the orchestral playing too, here and throughout, is lusty and unafraid to let go. Jarvi’s handling of that same moment is more contained, and his tendency is to stress points of demarcation within Bernstein’s stylistic smorgasbord. Alsop is pacier, creating a dramatic slipstream that is powered relentlessly onwards by the awkward discontinuities and jagged narrative.

Even if this atheist cannot quite love the God-fearing D major affirmation of the final scene, as the Celebrant reconnects with his faith, it doesn’t matter. The journey—the process of discovery— counts for more. The haughty certainty of bad religious music is bad religion, worse music. Beethoven’s Credo from his Missa solemnis, Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem for a Young Poet probe the terror of God. Bernstein’s Mass sits in that tradition: make our garden grow—go tell it on the mountain.

One of the highlights of Marin Alsop’s tenure at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the exuberant performances of Bernstein’s “Mass” that played in Baltimore, New York and Washington in the fall of 2008, was issued this week on a Naxos CD…Alsop’s recording is certainly the best of the recent crop…Jubilant Sykes, Alsop’s Celebrant…[is] an interesting choice for the role—Alsop had performed the piece with him before, at the Hollywood Bowl—since he’s a singer who combines classical training with gospel…(The Naxos booklet includes a fine essay by my sorely missed late friend and colleague Robert Hilferty, who loved “Mass,” as a child, as much as I did.)…this new “Mass,” which is one of Alsop’s happiest achievements.

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass has long since transcended its original strong identification with Washington, D.C., and in so doing has also grown beyond its subtitle: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers. Bernstein was certainly seeking universality when he wrote this piece on commission from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971. That is why he used the Roman Catholic Tridentine Mass—sung in traditional Latin—as the basis for an emotional exploration of faith, and the challenges to it, in the modern world. In 32 sections that stretch through nearly two hours, Bernstein’s Mass starts in harmony, passes into doubt and uncertainty, climaxes in denial and sacrilege, then slowly rebuilds itself into an affirmation that allows the work to conclude with the traditional, “The Mass is ended; go in peace.” It is a remarkable emotional journey, and baritone Jubilant Sykes, as the Celebrant, goes through it—and takes listeners along—with both emotional fervor and a beautiful, wide-ranging vocal sound. Marin Alsop, a self-professed Bernstein protégé, clearly shares in the emotionalism and strong personal involvement to which this work invites all participants—performers and audience alike. She conducts with fervor and intensity, and the Baltimore Symphony and mostly young choral singers follow her with strength and flexibility, the orchestra’s brass being especially impressive…the fervor with which Alsop approaches many sections, such as the Street Chorus’ questioning of the tenets of the Mass, brings heady excitement to the work, and makes this performance as a whole a highly effective one. It is the second excellent recording of Bernstein’s Mass to be released this year—Kristjan Järvi’s more thoughtful but somewhat less dramatic reading is available on Chandos—and that fact alone, the appearance in so short a time of two recordings so distinguished, confirms that this work has moved well beyond its original standing as an occasional piece.

Bernstein’s Mass, now recorded on Naxos by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop, will forever be an early-1970s time capsule, but a piece in which the composer was stating his case on spiritual matters so feverishly that he often kept his own melodic effervescence on the sidelines, resulting in music that’s understandably shrill but musically second-rate. But is that less a problem than 30 years ago?...Though the piece always had its champions, detractors parted company with it on such a basic level that revisions wouldn’t have helped. At least it can now be viewed as the product of an era when sacred cows were casually slaughtered as America rebelled against any kind of authority and Pope John XXIII allowed populist innovations such as “guitar masses.”

Bernstein joined the protesters, though since his generation was being rebelled against, he was considered a poser. I don’t believe that. But as a composer, he wanted to matter, even though his musical idiom—applicable both to Broadway and symphonies in ways that made each side suspicious of him—was out of fashion. So if he couldn’t be a musical radical, he would be an ideological one—and he had the conviction to back it up. Maybe too much. Mass probes the nature of belief with all the grace of a battering ram and with such sprawling musical means that even the sympathetic album notes by the late Robert Hilferty describe Mass’ details as “zany” and “goofy.”…How could such a thing be rehabilitated? By performers, namely conductor Alsop and baritone Jubilant Sykes. Neither artist is always brilliant but they are here, thanks to a deep belief that, however recklessly Bernstein expressed himself, the underlying issues are important. Alsop is the voice of solidity and integration. Sykes turns his role into a monologue that’s too personal and vital to seem dated. Paradoxically, the more Sykes achieves dramatic specificity, the more I hear Bernstein himself talking in lines like “I feel like ev’ry psalm that I’ve ever sung turns to wormwood. …And I wonder…was I ever really young?”

Mass will always be a problem piece, but because Bernstein wasn’t prolific and because his influence has burgeoned since his death in 1990, everything he wrote is ripe for positive reexamination.

Leonard Bernstein’s own version bettered? Yes, indeed! This is, handily, the best sung, best played, most intelligently interpreted recording of Mass currently available. Of course, Bernstein’s rendition always will have sterling qualities, including some wonderful solo singers with really characterful “pop” and Broadway voices, but for its sheer musical integrity combined with the advantage of the composer’s final revisions to the score, this version is unbeatable. Jubilant Sykes, as the Celebrant, easily outclasses Alan Titus’ very fine premiere recording of the role. His voice has more edge; he’s more at ease with the various pop idioms; he sounds radiant at the work’s opening and grows increasingly desperate as it proceeds. This only serves to make his climactic breakdown tragically believable.

The various street singers are, one and all, terrific. “God Said” becomes the work’s comic climax, which is as it should be. “I believe in God”, “Confession”, “World Without End”, and “Thank You” are both idiomatic and beautifully sung. The children’s choir sounds luminous in the Sanctus, while the adult chorus, from Morgan State University, sings with gusto as well as immaculate diction, with every word clearly comprehensible. Marin Alsop knits the whole ensemble together with infallible insight and verve. Her tempos, a bit different from Bernstein’s, quicker here (“God Said”), a touch slower there (the wild dance in the Offertory), are no less right.

It’s all fabulously recorded with a glittering impact that never turns unduly aggressive. The multi-textural layering in the climactic Dona Nobis Pacem comes across as both musically and physically overwhelming. Mass has its detractors, but when performed with this kind of conviction the piece can be inexpressibly moving. Alsop never has made a finer recording—it’s both a tribute to her mentor Leonard Bernstein, as well as to her exceptional talent as an exponent of his music.

Last fall, Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in performances of this audaciously eclectic “Theatre piece for Singers, Players and Dancers” that generated large, enthusiastic crowds in Baltimore, Washington and New York.

There were glowing notices in most of the press, too, with little of the dismissive attitude that greeted the 1971 premiere of “Mass” at the opening of the Kennedy Center. Today, the genre-crossing ingenuity of Bernstein’s creation seems more impressive than ever. So does the breadth of his vision, the way he fuses the hope, wonder and, yes, theatricality of the Roman Catholic liturgy into a Lenny-style bear hug of universal tolerance and peace…The BSO recording has an electric charge throughout and boasts consistently vivid work from vocal and instrumental forces alike. Above all, there’s the advantage of a strikingly distinctive Celebrant in Jubilant Sykes. The baritone phrases throughout with an immediacy and naturalness that draws the listener into a truly redemptive experience.

He sculpts the pop-idiom passages in disarming fashion, where more opera-centric soloists on the other recordings can sound a little stiff at times. And he achieves mesmerizing intensity in the daunting mad scene, “Things Get Broken,” when the Celebrant undergoes a crisis of faith that stuns and eventually refocuses his congregation. I’m convinced Bernstein would have considered Sykes a godsend (so to speak).

If the baritone gives the performance its soul, Alsop provides abundant heart. She believes totally in this music, and that faith shines in every measure. As is her wont, she keeps things moving along; the recording clocks in at 14 minutes faster than Bernstein’s…but the pacing feels right.

The BSO sounds terrific, producing considerable emotional power in the Meditations. The Morgan State University Choir shines. Members of the “street chorus” make vibrant contributions and, like Sykes, seem perfectly at home stylistically…Boy soprano Asher Edward Wulfman hits some tentative notes, but communicates affectingly. The Peabody Children’s Chorus also does fine work, although I miss the telling sound of a boy choir, which Bernstein intended…Still, Alsop and the BSO provide the more thoroughly persuasive and involving account of this groundbreaking work.

Leonard Bernstein dragged the Roman Catholic liturgy kicking and screaming into the 20th century, and with advances in sound engineering this spectacular new recording can fully exploit the score’s wide dynamic range. It is unquestionably the finest thing that Marin Alsop has yet placed on disc, and it comes with the pedigree of being from a Bernstein protégée.  I went back to my original test pressings I reviewed back in 1971 and found the composer conducting a different view, Alsop giving more emphasis to the sacred aspects. Still I love Bernstein’s cynicism in his recording with its biting use of words and jagged jazz rhythms. It was a stark warning that society could disintegrate, but sadly it has gone unheeded, and maybe this vivid restatement will yank somebody out of the malaise into which we are sliding. To deliver that missive with maximum impact, Bernstein  often pits worldliness against the innocence of the children’s choir, as we hear in the First Introit, where the noisy and banal music interrupts the sounds that appear to come from church choir stalls. The absolutely bizarre aspect of this release comes in a booklet that fails to individually credit the people in the roles of the Soprano, Blues and Rock singers, for you only have to listen to the Confession (disc 1 tracks 10 & 11), and the pivotal moment, ‘I believe in God’ (track 14), to realise that it is their contribution that makes the release very special. In the actor/singer role of the Celebrant we have Jubilant Sykes, a baritone who moves happily between major opera houses and the world of jazz. He throws everything he has into the performance, changing his style to suite the words and situation to perfection. The Morgan State University Choir prove a virile and powerful group, while those singing the Street People are so ideal for the part. Alsop’s choice of tempo is right at every twist and turn, the orchestra, with a host of additional musicians - including electric guitars, ‘rock’ organ and a range of percussion - is full of impact and oozing with virtuosity. A disturbing score but it is imperative you hear and experience it.