The church music of the Salzburg composer Michael Haydn was greatly admired by his contemporaries, but not much of it is known or recorded today. This CD offers three works connected with the Feast of the Innocents, and accordingly written for boys' choir alone—it is done here by girls, but with a pleasing firmness of tone that suits the music well. The 13 voices of the choir are accompanied here by no more than two violins and a cello, with organ and, where called for, a pair of horns. This may be perfectly authentic though we cannot be sure that so very small a group would really have been appropriate in the vast spaces of Salzburg Cathedral, for which these works were intended; but the effect is good and careful balancing ensures that the strings can always be clearly heard. And certainly they are kept pretty busy. Haydn's preferred texture—and this is the same in all three works, although the Masses date from as far apart as 1777 and 1805 and the Vespers from 1793—is a simple chordal one for the voices, which are often in thirds or sixths, with a predominantly repeated-note bass and quickish figuration for the violins. A great deal of the music is in triple time (perhaps a symbolic choice by Haydn, if not by Trinity College). Haydn's Masses are, in general, similar in style to the early ones of Mozart, with each section in a single movement, though in the early work he has a slower ''Et incarnatus'' (in G minor) and resumes with a cheery 3/4 at ''Et resurrexit''. The Vespers, a setting of five psalms with a simple homophonic hymn, is rather more varied in texture, with a few hints (notably in the ''Memento David'') of counterpoint, and with an expressive E minor ''De profundis''; each ends with the doxology (''Sicut erat in principio''), sung to the music as it was at the beginning of the psalm. Plainsong antiphons, from which Haydn drew in his settings, are happily included here.
The performances are enjoyable—simple, direct, unaffected and on the whole well sung, though some of the young soloists are either a shade microphone-shy or too distantly recorded: perhaps it was intentional, as that is after all how one would hear them in a liturgical performance. Occasionally a movement is taken at a speed that makes the violin detail sound rather hurried, especially in the rather more elaborate Sancti Aloysii. I am slightly hesitant about recommending this CD beyond those who are already enthusiastic about this kind of music, as it is rather unvaried: the idiom ranges, you might say, from late rococo to very late rococo, and the treatment scarcely at all. But the recording does offer an attractive glimpse of the kind of church music used in Salzburg during and after Mozart's time. It is informatively annotated by the conductor, Richard Marlow.'