My attention was drawn to this telecast of a performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music by a friend who is the brother of the tenor soloist. I enjoyed the performance, with brisk tempi and a choir who were not numerous but seemed well on top of the music (one particular soprano lead near the end of the Creed, which is usually shaky, came through clearly). My main reservation was that I sometimes felt the addition of the organ to be intrusive; maybe it seemed less so if you were in the hall.
There was however additional interest in seeing how the filming compared to, say, that of a choral Prom from the Albert Hall. We got many more shots of the chorus, or at least of some of them, as what you saw most of was the alto section. Perhaps the sopranos, ranged in front of them, weren’t so telegenic as they contorted their faces to reach the high notes or betrayed panic at the approach of some of the harder passages? At any rate one can, for example, compare concert dress with that worn by British choirs.
Google Translate doesn’t cope well with Hungarian, and I end with some quotations from its version of the page: ‘it can be compared to a symphony with a sibling… Beethoven was captured by the muse in the stratosphere, so he made a great effort on the fly to make it more monumental in liturgical contexts. ….Missa Beethoven is perhaps the most difficult piece to perform, so it is so numerous that the Óbuda Danubia Orchestra is now performing with the National Singing Car and Opera’s four private singers. … High and loud music, at the same time, is the strongest one, which brings meditatively into one and moves deeply to every person. … When the chorus and Gloria sound out of nowhere, except for Bach, all the religious music is obscured. There is no man to run the cold on his back.’