Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra, Clyde Mitchell - Christopher Tyler Nickel: Mass | Te Deum
Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra, Clyde Mitchell - Christopher Tyler Nickel: Mass | Te Deum (Avie, 2025)
Canadian Composer Christopher Tyler Nickel has covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. In sacred music alone, he has recently released The Gospel According to Mark—An Oratorio (Avie, 2023) and Requiem (Avie, 2024), the former a mammoth seven hour performance of the wartime gospel. It should be no surprise that Nickel turns his attention to the proper of the Mass and the Te Deum. He follows in the very large footsteps of previous composers, not the least of whom are Handel and Bruckner.
Nickel’s Mass is a slim affair, clocking in at 26:06. Compared with even the fastest performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, John Eliot Gardiner’s brisk 1991 Archiv recording at 71 minutes doubles and half again Nickel’s composition. Apples and oranges: the two are not comparable. What Nickel provides is a Mass for the 21st century, one with anxiety, anticipation, exaltation, and, yes, blessed brevity. The Vancouver Chamber Choir is masterly with Nickel’s circuitous melodies and soprano, Catherine Redding, previously heard in Nickel’s The Gospel According to Mark and Requiem, is equally up to the task here. This is a tasteful and reverent treatment of the Mass, as well as a taut updating of the form.
The composer's Te Deum offers a generous interpretation of the sacred text, its origins uncertain but reputedly authored by Sts. Ambrose, Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, and Nicetas of Remesiana. As long as the Mass (at 25:29) the Te Deum is a vocally denser work, drawing on the more darkly hued voices in the choir. As with the previous recordings, the Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra, beneath the baton of Clyde Mitchell, provides a seamless cloth upon which Nickel’s sacred works lay. This is no time to abandon the older forms when they remain of such integral importance to the history of music and civilization.