Word: requiem
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...Mozart Requiem is a redoubtable piece of music, largely because it is not all Mozart's. Left unfinished at his death, the Requiem was completed by one Sussmayr on commission from Mozart's widow. Only the Requiem aeternam and the Kyrie are pure Mozart, while the rest was either reconstructed from hs sketches or fabricated totally anew. As a result, many musicians in recent years have not considered the work worth performing...
...such thoughts here. Saturday night, conductor F. John Adams exploded this musical myth and several others. In addition to mounting the Mozart-Sussmayr Requiem complete, Adams had Robert Levin compose an Amen fugue to follow the sequence Dies irae. Levin's fugue was based on fragments left by Mozart which Sussmayr, for some obscure reason, preferred to leave untouched. Brief but masterful and prodigious, the fugue sported a long Brahmsian timpanum roll which acted as a tonic pedal bringing the fugue to conclusion. It was another plume for Levin's many chapeaux...
Performing the Requiem was a carefully picked group of musicians. Adams recruited the chorus of sixty from the Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and the University Choir. The modest orchestra da chiesa contained some of Harvard's most respected undergraduate musicians. Of the four soloists, soprano Carlotta Wilsen conducts the Radcliffe Freshmen Chorus, tenor Henry Gibbons is the music tutor of Lowell House, and bass David Ripley is a freshman. Adams thus refuted the current contention that a major choral-orchestral work cannot be performed at Harvard without importing most of the necessary musicians from the outside...
This was truly a Harvard requiem--and an excellent one. Conductor Adams brought a superbly disciplined ensemble to St. Paul's and managed to overcome the church's infamous reverberation problems by rigorously controlling volume and by taking tempos somewhat slower than those usually heard on recording...
...slow to slower. To sustain interest within such a restrictive format, the score trades on subtlety rather than splash, deftly plays the wistful mewings of the string quintet against the dense harmonies of the orchestra, intertwines exquisite vocal patterns like a kaleidoscope turning in slow motion. Brilliantly performed, Requiem was distinctly modern but never abrasively atonal, a somber, moving prayer celebrating man and his God. For Josephs, 39, the success of his Requiem marks him as one of Britain's most promising young composers. He is something of a late-bloomer, he says, because to support himself...