There’s some heaven-storming here à la Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis’’ (which premiered just before these Masses were completed), but for the most part Schubert addresses the Almighty like a shy lover. The opening Kyrie Eleisons are gentle, imploring; the one from the Mass in E-flat is in triple time, like a dreamy waltz. Where other composers fill their Masses with operatic arias, Schubert gives us lullabies. The A-flat Mass’s Sanctus conjures Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of mountaintop crosses; the pizzicato bass of the E-flat’s Credo seems to be trying to slip into heaven when God isn’t looking. Schubert expresses doubt via unexpected key changes and harmonic shifts that look ahead 40 years to Bruckner; the E-flat Mass even sounds as if it were ending in C minor.
Sawallisch has an exalted quintet of soloists - Helen Donath, Ingeborg Springer, Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, Peter Schreier, and Theo Adam - and an orchestra and chorus that rank with Leinsdorf’s Berlin forces. The soloists sing as if the words and not their egos were paramount. Sawallisch seems to do nothing; maybe that’s why it all sounds so sublime.
SIBELIUS: Symphonies Nos. 1-7, ‘‘The Oceanides,’’ ‘‘Finlandia,’’ and ‘‘Tapiola’’
Paavo Berglund; Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra (EMI)
Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund, who died last month at age 82, was a revolutionary from the start. Never mind that he was one of the world’s few left-handed conductors — he actually joined the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1949 as a lefthanded violinist. In his final Boston appearance, with the BSO in October 2005, he slumped in a chair on the podium and barely raised the baton above his knees while making Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony sound like Shakespeare.
