Himself
This performance of Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, which remained an unfinished torso, is reverent and highly dramatic. It was filmed 4-6 April 1990 in the beautiful Baroque Basilica of Waldsassen in Bavaria: a few kilometers from the Czech border. It was filmed just a few months after the Iron Curtain had fallen, a mere 6 months before Bernstein's death on 14 October 1990. His painful, labored breathing is evident during this performance. It is a sad reminder of what is to come and it makes this performance, so other-worldly in many ways, particularly poignant. Bernstein conducts the splendid Chor und Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.
Fenton
It is to composer and librettist Arrigo Boito and his constant pestering of the octogenarian Verdi that there remained within him one last great comedy fighting to get out that we owe this absolute miracle of an opera. Produced in 1893 as Verdi turned 80 there is much in this masterpiece that can be identified as a modernist neoclassical work. The use of short motifs instead of long arioso melodic lines, the spry and reduced orchestral textures and the lack of a single 'stand and deliver' dramatic declamatory aria all serve to make this more of a 20th century work than an example of 19th century late-Romanticism.
