Bruckner Mass No. 3 – Janowski

Bruckner wrote the Mass No. 3 in F minor the way other men write letters of gratitude after surviving something they were not sure they would survive. The Kreuzschule breakdown of 1867, the humiliations by two women who wanted nothing to do with him, the death of Sechter — all of it went into the ink. You can hear the residue of crisis in the Kyrie, which opens not with confidence but with a kind of tentative gathering of breath, strings hovering, before the choir enters like a congregation unsure whether the man beside them is really cured.

Janowski does not oversell any of this. That is, on the whole, to his credit.

His choice of the 2005 Hawkshaw critical edition matters more than most listeners will register on a first pass. This is not the version that circulated in the Nowak or Haas editions for decades, and the differences are subtle rather than seismic — voice leading here, a dynamic marking there — but they add up to a reading that feels less encrusted with reading tradition, more like Bruckner thinking on the page. Janowski suits this material well.

The Rundfunkchor Berlin sings with a blended, burnished tone that makes you forget how difficult this music actually is to bring off. Bruckner buries traps everywhere: the Gloria‘s fugal writing wants both weight and agility, a combination choruses rarely manage without sounding like they’re doing homework. This choir dispatches the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” with a cleanness of attack that had me sitting up somewhere around the second entrance. Not a hint of scoop. The sopranos keep their top register bright without going steely, which in a hall as resonant as the Victoria Hall in Geneva is no small feat of discipline.

Janowski’s tempos sit on the patient side without ever congealing. The Credo unfolds with a sense of architecture rather than incident; you feel him building toward “Et resurrexit” rather than simply arriving there. Some conductors — Celibidache above all, in his glacial Munich account — turn this into ritual so slow it risks becoming furniture. Janowski keeps it moving. Barely. But he does.

The solo quartet deserves its own paragraph, and I’ll give it one.

Franz Josef Selig is the find of this album, a bass of granite steadiness who never once forces tone to fill space, letting the natural resonance of the voice do the work Bruckner assumed a good bass would do. Iris Vermillion sings with an interior glow that suggests she has actually prayed these words rather than merely translated them. Lenneke Ruiten’s soprano floats cleanly above the ensemble textures without turning thin or effortful, and Shawn Mathey, given less to do than the others, does it cleanly. Together in the Benedictus they achieve something genuinely rare: an account of “Hosanna in excelsis” that sounds less like a climax than a release, the tension of the whole work finally let go.

Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is a slightly unexpected choice for this repertoire — one thinks of Bruckner and reaches instinctively for a German or Austrian band with decades of this sound in its bones. But the playing here is alert, the brass chorale work in the Gloria blended rather than blaring, and Pentatone’s engineering catches every strand of the string writing with a warmth that never blurs into mush.

Where does this leave the recording in a crowded field? Not at the summit. Eugen Jochum’s mid-1960s account with the Bavarian Radio forces still has an unmatched combination of scale and intimacy, and Herbert von Karajan’s late Vienna reading, for all its occasional heaviness, brings a spiritual gravity that is its own argument. But Janowski’s version belongs in the conversation, and belongs there specifically because of its transparency: you hear the mechanics of Bruckner’s faith as much as its expression.

One complaint, and it’s not small: no printed texts in the booklet. For a mass setting, of all things, this is an odd omission, and listeners without Latin memorized from childhood catechism will find themselves reaching for outside sources mid-listen.

Still, a performance of real conviction, cleanly sung, thoughtfully paced, honestly recorded. Bruckner, who doubted himself more than his music ever suggests he should have, would probably have been grateful for the care taken here. I certainly was.