A German composer does not lightly lay claim to having written a Grosse Messe, and Felix Draeseke (1853-1913), rather than directly emulating Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, evokes the memory of Palestrina and writes a cappella, placing his five movements of more or less average length around the giant centrepiece of his Credo. He requires from his singers total concentration (the possibility of the Grosse Messe falling apart at the seams is horrendous to contemplate but all too possible); yet he asks no more than he has given, which has doubtless been the unremitting pursuit of the highest in technical skill and spiritual devotion. If such a process could guarantee a masterpiece, it should deliver one here.
My feeling is that it has not quite done that. Draeseke was one of the neudeutsche Schule, a contemporary of Cornelius and Tausig, admirer of Liszt and Wagner, protege for a while of von Bulow. There is an intense self-consciousness about his writing, combining the academic disciplines with cautious harmonic explorations. As a nineteenth-century composer he wants to establish a distinctive voice – and successfully does so in, for example, the compassionate tone of the “in remissionem peccatorum” and the urgent motion of the Agnus Dei. As a dutiful academic writing in the polyphonic tradition, he feels constrained to work within a more impersonal discipline, forever guarding his melodies and rhythms against anything that might be construed as popular in their appeal. He was a prolific and none too fortunate composer. One feels he deserves a hearing, and at the very least this presents him in more considerable style than does the early piano sonata (on Altarus) which is the only other work of his to be found in the current catalogue.
The four part-songs of Schumann provide a suitable companion-piece and are themselves none too familiar. The Netherlands choir sing with their habitual mastery, achieving a perfect clarity in a challengingly reverberant acoustic. The written notes lack detail on the works, and the texts are untranslated.'