Beginning a concert that threw two very different works seemingly randomly together, Martyn Brabbins and his BBC forces blew the dust off the Missa de Santa Cecília by José Maurício Nunes Garcia – a pioneering composer you’ve probably never heard of, unless you were listening to BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week last October. A contemporary of Beethoven living in colonial Brazil, he was of mixed race and his grandparents had been enslaved, but he rose to become court composer to the Portuguese royal family in Rio de Janeiro.
His 1826 mass is a huge work that wears its influences clearly – Mozart, Haydn, a touch of the Italian bel canto that was so fashionable 6,000 miles away – and yet sounds distinctly his own. It’s mellower, warmer, more contented-sounding than its European models, and the music flows easily without ever sounding trite. Here, with the BBC Symphony Chorus making fine work of some gratifying choral writing, it sounded lovely, and also long: it lasts well over an hour, perhaps too long for this material in a concert-hall context.
