John Eliot Gardiner conducts Mozart's Great Mass with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists. Or rather, what exists of the work: Mozart had imagined a work so ambitious it could never have been completed. What we do have--thanks partly to reconstruction by the conductor of this recording--is one of Mozart's most idiosyncratic works, rich in contrasts between the past (Bach and Handel) and the present (modern Italian composition). A wonderful disc. --Joshua Cody