The early sacred music of Franz Schubert has an artless quality that poses the deepest kinds of problems for performers. Even more than many of his songs, paradoxically, they have in many passages a tendency toward dancelike rhythms that's very hard to catch without going overboard into sentimentality. The Immortal Bach Ensemble, from the immortally Bachian city of Leipzig, is a descendant of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Chamber Choir. Its sound is enviably precise, and the sunny and somewhat larger Mass No. 4 in C major, D. 452, that opens the disc fares quite well. The earliest work on the program here, the Mass No. 2 in G major, D. 167, is the tough one. The lilting, walking rhythms of the Kyrie, which set the tone for the entire mass, don't have the proper Viennese swing, and the soloists, perhaps at the behest of Danish conductor
Morten Schuldt-Jensen, further break the mood by pushing the tempo. Then, when the mood of the music does actually darken, as for instance in the Agnus Dei, the choir's reading is curiously deadpan. In the Deutsche Messe, D. 872, written on commission for a very simple set of German-language liturgical music, they are back on solid, almost Bachian ground. The notes, save for an odd misspelling of the name of tenor Raimund Minarschik (the first "i" in his surname gets capitalized throughout), are informative, although text for the German would have been helpful. Not in the least unpleasant, this disc nevertheless has plenty of competition among recordings of the Mass No. 2, one of the most perfect examples of Schubertian lyricism in existence.