Volker David Kirchner

Volker David Kirchner's Missa Moguntina for soloists, choir and orchestra was written for Mainz Cathedral, and this is the recording of its first performance there on 21 November 1993. Kirchner spent many hours in the cathedral studying its atmosphere, its acoustics and even the noise of people walking, so that the building itself would sound in the music.

Volker David Kirchner was born in Mainz on 25 June 1942 and died in Wiesbaden on 4 February 2020. He studied at the Peter Cornelius Conservatory in Mainz from 1956 and at the Cologne Musikhochschule from 1959 to 1963, where he attended the master classes of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. A violist as well as a composer, he played in the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1966 and in the Kehr Trio, and he co-founded the Ensemble 70 in Wiesbaden in 1970. He wrote incidental music for the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden before turning to composition full time, with many works for the stage. In 1992 the city of Mainz awarded him its Gutenberg Medal, and he also received the Rhineland-Palatinate composers' prize. Mathias Breitschaft conducts the Mainzer Domchor, the Domkantorei St. Martin and the Mainzer Domorchester, with Albert Schönberger at the organ. The soloists are Maria Karb, Alison Browner, Mads Elung-Jensen, Johannes M. Kösters and Gregory Reinhart, with two boy sopranos. The recording is a coproduction with the Südwestfunk, produced by Hans Oskar Koch, and the work is dedicated to Maria Strecker-Daelen.

The text follows the Latin Ordinary of the Mass, with one change: Psalm 130, De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine, is inserted between the Gloria and the Credo. The Credo therefore begins at the lowest possible point and leads, leaving out the historical clauses, straight to its climax at Et resurrexit. The six sections are Kyrie, Gloria, Psalmus, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, over fifty-one minutes. Kirchner described the struggle with these words: "these texts cannot be composed like a telephone-book", they push one into the depths again and again.

The local press heard the premiere warmly. Reviewing it two days later, the Mainz Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that "Kirchner found the way to the new light" and that both the Missa and its interpretation were something very special. Kirchner had already set the Mass for the dead in his Requiem Messa di Pace, also recorded by Wergo.

CD, Wergo WER 6262 2, released in 1993.