Villa on Vinyl #4: Mass of Saint Sebastian

 

Here's an LP from my birth year, 1952. Werner Janssen conducts the Chorus of the University of California at Berkeley in Villa's Mass of Saint Sebastian.

Villa-Lobos wrote his Missa São Sebastião in the period December 1936 to January 1937. He must have been thrilled with this opportunity to have a major choral work recorded for Columbia Masterworks during one of his regular trips to America in the 1950s. And he would have been pleased to work again with conductor Werner Janssen, who had made a major recording of the Choros #10, perhaps Villa's greatest work, in Los Angeles in 1949. The two would finish off their California trilogy with another Capitol album in 1952, which I'll feature Real Soon Now in a future Villa on Vinyl post.

The Mass came from Villa's interest in the choral music of Palestrina; he wrote it after he conducted the first Brazilian performance of the Missa Papae Marcelli in Rio de Janeiro. To appreciate what a wonderful work this is, I would recommend the wonderful 1993 recording by the Corydon Singers on Hyperion (the link is at the end of this post). Alas, the singing by the Berkeley choir on this disc is fine but doesn't really do the work justice.

The album design is by Herb Meyers, whose Monogram Art Studio did a lot of work for Columbia Masterworks in the 1950s. This Stravinsky cover is Meyers' first, from 1948. It was used as a template for many more Columbia LPs in this period.

Here are three of my favourite Meyer covers, all on Columbia Masterworks, all from 1952: the Dancers of Bali, Gershwin by Andre Kostelanetz and Schoenberg's Erwartung.

Here's the Corydon Singers' version of the Missa: