Among Joseph Haydn’s many Masses, the Missa Cellensis in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae — written around 1766 — holds a special place: not only for its scale and complexity, but for the way it redefines the sacred.
Here, Haydn intertwines the contrapuntal discipline of the past with a sense of drama and expressivity that foreshadows his later, symphonic-style Masses. It is music that unites heaven and earth, devotion and reason, ritual and theatre.

In this new Alpha Classics recording, René Jacobs restores to the Missa Cellensis its dual essence — liturgical and theatrical, collective and deeply personal. His conducting sculpts rather than dictates. Each section, from the grave, suspended Kyrie to the expansive Gloria and introspective Credo, feels like an edifice built to let light pass through.

Jacobs’ focus is on transparency and balance. The Kammerorchester Basel plays with crystalline precision; winds and brass serve as bright pillars in this sonic cathedral, while the strings sustain the music’s architecture with suppleness and air. The Zürcher Sing-Akademie provides the radiant core: powerful yet fluid, capable of shifting from prayerful intimacy to exultant grandeur with effortless cohesion.

Soloists Mari Eriksmoen, Kristina Hammarström, Mark Milhofer, and Christian Senn embody what Jacobs calls a “spirituality of clarity”: pure timbres, lucid phrasing, and a refusal of empty ornamentation. In a repertoire that often indulges in excess, their restraint becomes a form of eloquence.

Critically, Jacobs’ reading is notable for how it rebalances the tension between the old style and the new, the contrapuntal and the expressive — a dialectic central to late-18th-century thought.
Haydn, poised between Palestrina’s purity and Enlightenment sensibility, finds reconciliation in Jacobs’ interpretation: faith as harmony between order and emotion.

Structurally, the Mass opens with austere clarity and closes with tender serenity. The final “Dona nobis pacem” is not triumphal but human — a collective sigh rather than a celestial fanfare.
Jacobs resists the monumental; he reveals the sacred as a space for listening, not authority.