Jan Dismas Zelenka remains one of those composers whose reputation has been built almost entirely on the enthusiasm of a devoted minority. He died in Dresden in 1745, court composer in everything but title — the post he wanted, and was denied, went to Johann Adolf Hasse — and for the better part of two centuries his music moldered in manuscript. The revival has been real and genuine, driven by performers who recognized something irreducibly individual in his harmonic language, his fondness for chromatic turns that seem to anticipate a later age entirely, his rhythmic energy that can feel almost physical. And yet the Missa Paschalis of 1726 has attracted, until now, only a single commercial disc — Adam Viktora’s Czech release on Nibiru from 2014. That’s a gap worth closing, and Lukas Wanner’s ensemble closes it well.
The mass was written for Easter Monday. Not Easter Sunday — Monday, which in the liturgical calendar carries a slightly more relaxed, post-climactic character, the stone already rolled away, the alleluias no longer urgent but settled into celebration. Whether Zelenka shaped his setting with that in mind is hard to say definitively, but there’s a luminosity to this music that feels appropriate. The Kyrie opens with an energy that isn’t penitential in the usual Baroque sense — it almost skips.
Wanner leads I Pizzicanti with evident affection and a clear sense of architecture. The Gloria, which in lesser hands can sprawl into a sequence of loosely connected movements, holds together here as a genuine argument. The choral writing in Zeronove — a relatively young ensemble, but one that sounds disciplined without sounding cautious — is clean without being antiseptic. Intonation is good. The blend in the inner voices, which in live recordings often reveals the seams, is mostly secure.
What strikes you most forcefully, though, is how individual Zelenka’s voice actually is — not a pale reflection of Bach, not a provincial variant of the Italian style he absorbed during his years of study in Vienna and Rome, but something genuinely his own. The “Crucifixus” in the Credo has a chromatic intensity that stops you. So does the harmonic swerve near the end of the Agnus Dei, a moment that sounds almost out of place in 1726, a glancing forward into territory that Haydn would only begin to occupy decades later.
The Handel on the other side of this program — and it is genuinely puzzling programming — is the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, written in 1737 after the death of George II’s queen, a woman Handel had known and admired for years. This is not obscure repertory. It has been recorded multiple times and is regularly performed; Donald Burrows, in his authoritative OUP study of the composer, treats it as one of Handel’s finest choral achievements, which it is. The connection to Zelenka is essentially biographical trivia: both composers were alive at the same time, and Handel may have encountered Zelenka during his 1719 Dresden visit — though I can find no firm documentation of any meaningful exchange between them in Hogwood or Burrows or the New Grove.
The anthem gets a solid, straightforward reading here. Handel’s writing for double choir, with its grand antiphonal blocks and its moments of sudden, grief-stricken intimacy — the bass line descending like a slow footfall — comes through clearly. The recorded sound, captured live at St. Peter in Basel in May 2025, has warmth without muddiness, which is not always easy to achieve in a stone church.
But I’ll be direct: the Handel, fine as it is, feels like a somewhat arbitrary companion to the Zelenka. It doesn’t illuminate the mass, and the mass doesn’t illuminate it. Programming that juxtaposes two Baroque works from the same decade doesn’t automatically create meaning. What this disc offers is one major discovery — or rediscovery, if we’re generous — and one handsome account of a familiar masterpiece. That’s not nothing. The Missa Paschalis alone makes this release worth your time, and Wanner’s advocacy for it is the kind of committed, intelligent musicianship that keeps the repertory alive and growing. Recommended.
