Tage Alter Musik Regensburg Review 2025: The Spiritual Concert

A Ceremonial Finale in Regensburg Featuring Alessandro Striggio’s ‘Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno’

By Mengguang Huang
(Photo Credit: Step by Step Productions)

The 40th Regensburg Early Music Festival concluded with a gesture as grand as its milestone year. A performance of Alessandro Striggio’s “Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno”—a 40-part polyphonic mass—transcended the bounds of concert and became a revived rite. Long queues stretched down the street outside St. Blasius Church, as festivalgoers—some wheeling suitcases—gathered as if more for a pilgrimage.

The rite began at the threshold. Brass players and singers, led by conductor Hervé Niquet, processed solemnly through the church’s west portal while chanting a plainchant introit. This ceremonial entrance reasserted a central principle of historically informed performance: that sacred music should be heard, and felt, as part of sacred ceremony.

Striggio’s mass is an acoustic monument. Forty separate vocal and instrumental lines, arranged into five choirs, create a sonic structure so vast that no performance—especially in a resonant Gothic space—can convey every detail. Niquet wisely focused instead on the interplay between choirs, using color, pacing, and gesture to guide the listener’s ear. Choir III, with sackbuts and Renaissance bassoons, offered burnished depth; Choir IV glimmered with harp and harpsichord; Choirs I and V, purely vocal, framed the mass with lyric force; a continuo group anchored the whole, rising vividly in “Et resurrexit” as low strings surged with seismic weight.

To sustain shape and avoid monotonous sonic saturation, Niquet interspersed the mass with contrasting material. Instrumental interludes and polyphonic works by Francesco Corteccia and Orazio Benevoli refracted Striggio’s grandeur through different lenses. Corteccia, Striggio’s elder at the Florentine court, offered poised, transparent textures; Benevoli, writing a century later in Rome, expanded the idiom with rhetorical sweep and jubilant massiveness. Within this context, Striggio’s mass became both keystone and culmination.

The concert concluded with Striggio’s “Ecce beatam lucem,” another 40-part work. If the mass was architectural, the motet was celebratory: luminous, compact, and harmonically exultant—a radiant dome crowning the cathedral beneath it.

This monumental 40-part work felt like a deliberate echo of the festival’s 40th anniversary—a perfect symmetry of sound and celebration.The audience’s response matched the scale and spirit of the event. After seventy minutes of uninterrupted colossus music, cheers broke forth—an ovation not just for difficulty conquered, but for ceremony reclaimed. Outside, the summer evening still glowed, with festival organizers handed out filled chocolates as parting gifts. It was hard not to think of ancient pilgrims leaving a high feast: spiritually nourished, sweetly seen off, and gently returned to the world.

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