Returning to this after a longish period (and without the American LPs now at hand for direct comparison), I find it better in sound than remembered but ultimately almost offensive as a performance. Of a work as great as the Missa solemnis it can hardly be said that one movement is more 'important' than another, but the final impression is made by the Agnus Dei: it has all the weight of the preceding prayer and praise behind it, and its peculiar tension is right at the heart of the matter. This performance wears a face (if one may put it this way) which seems to say ''Tension? What tension?''. Its ''Dona nobis pacem'' is a hearty, confident, swing-along demand rather than prayer. It seems not to have realized the carnage and destruction implicit in the drums and trumpets; it has no spirituality.
Coming now to firmer ground, it is unfirmness that first has to be noted. The sopranos of the Singing City Choirs need to have been vetted for vibrato; there is far too much of it in that cruelly exposed top line. Martina Arroyo has a fairly tight operatic vibrato, Cesare Siepi has the wider, slower sort, and the other soloists come somewhere in between. It is not a homogeneous quartet, though individually they do some fine work, especially Forrester and Siepi in their long, testing phrases in the Agnus Dei. Orchestrally, this is among the most accomplished of performances, with magnificent playing in fast and exciting passages. It is here, with both choir and orchestra, that Ormandy brings his most distinctive touch. The Gloria's ''Quoniam'', the Credo's ''descendit'' and ''Et resurrexit'', the Sanctus's ''Pleni sunt caeli'' are all moments to make you sit up, exciting in themselves yet incidental in the character of the Mass as a whole.
With that character I cannot sense that the performance has much affinity, highly talented as it is in resources. The soundis, as I say, better than remembered, the soloists (for instance) less disproportionately prominent; but problems of balance are not really solved, for the chorus, sometimes well-forward, is at other times too recessed. Confinement to a single disc is a bonus, but the Gramophone Award-winning Gardiner (Archiv Produktion) and Kvam (Nimbus) are also one-disc issues, while Barenboim, on two discs, is at mid price. All three in their different ways are preferable to this.'