Johann Simon Mayr‚ the Bavarian­born composer who was a leading figure in serious Italian opera in the decades around 1800‚ and was Donizetti’s principal teacher in Bergamo‚ wrote about 70 operas‚ a dozen oratorios and numerous cantatas. He was comparably prolific as a church composer. The Mass recorded here was commissioned in the 1820s for use at the monastery at Einsiedeln‚ in Switzerland. The informative liner­notes mention that the people at Einsiedeln found it rather long and difficult. But don’t be put off: it does have some expansive and learned fugal choral numbers‚ but also some decidedly jaunty ones‚ such as the ‘Quoniam’ and the ‘Et resurrexit’‚ and at the heart of it is a touching ‘Et incarnatus’ for the soloists with an elaborate and chromatic solo violin part‚ which continues into the dramatic ‘Crucifixus’ that follows‚ with sombre trumpets in the background. (Some of the Credo is not in fact by Mayr at all but by Donizetti himself‚ borrowed for the occasion.) In general the idiom is what we tend to think of as operatic‚ although to Italian and South German Catholic churchgoers of the time it was simply the standard musical language. The eloquence of the Benedictus‚ another movement for the soloists‚ is again of a kind familiar to us from opera; similarly the Agnus Dei‚ with its expressive clarinet obbligato and its impassioned ‘Miserere nobis’ pleas from the contralto and the tenor. Of the Mozart items‚ two are arrangements. Quis te comprehendat comes from the Adagio third movement of the Wind Serenade K361/370a‚ with choral music superimposed on the original texture‚ which is shared out between organ‚ violin (taking on the original solo wind lines) and orchestra‚ sometimes to slightly banal effect (it might do better at a slower tempo); In te Domine speravi is simply a revised version of the aria K505 that Mozart wrote in 1786 for Nancy Storace‚ the original Susanna‚ and himself at the piano – the organ plays a version of the piano part. The Salve regina is a pleasant little piece long attributed to Mozart but now recognised not to be his. All this music is capably performed‚ with neat and stylish solo singing and a very adequate choir and an orchestra whose string players are Georgians living in Ingolstadt‚ close to Mayr’s native village.