Word: requiems
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...Requiem, however, may well be the most memorable object in this collection. There is something in its lines that transcends without forgetting its original wood. That is, there is a soaring upward movement to the composition like a requiem sung to exalt and commemorate the dead. It echoes of a Gothic Cathedral's flying buttresses, and yet it is all on a small scale and an observer could either wax metaphysical about such images or simply enjoy Thompson's wood-craftmanship and skill with pattern...
Affronted, Brock purloins a ticket to heaven instead. But paradise makes him uncomfortable, despite the music (Fauré's Requiem, Beethoven's Ninth), the soaring entrance hall and the "little mayonnaise concoctions" served by white-robed nuns. Brock gladly boards a plane for his assigned place in hell and his fate: to fornicate forever...
...repertory. Of the 14 other operas that he wrote, Billy Budd may soon earn a similar popularity, and if it does not, the underappreciated A Midsummer Night's Dream should. His plentiful songs and chamber works show the soulful, reflective side of his nature. The declamatory, powerful War Requiem (1962), which deploys huge forces and intersperses liturgical Latin with antiwar poetry, is perhaps his best work. Not one to compose in a vacuum or ivory tower, Britten in 1948 joined with friends to found the Aldeburgh Festival in a little town on the bleak Suffolk coast he called home...
...Verdi Requiem was a marvel of controlled fervor. Soprano Mirella Freni's concluding Libera me had a rare blend of sweetness and power. The Brahms Requiem seemed cut from velvet rather than the usual broadcloth. Karajan's reading was a subdued rumination, a realization of the deeply personal utterance the composer drew from the Lutheran Bible. In the elegiac "And ye now therefore have sorrow," Soprano Leontyne Price seemed to distill grief and comfort into a burnished flow of melody...
...Tricks. For the Mozart Requiem, Karajan opted convincingly for a large symphonic approach, sweeping the music along with crisp rhythms and an ingenious succession of tempos. Bruckner's Te Deum has a peculiarly spare, even austere ring; Karajan caught that quality by the simple expedient of exposing all its modal harmonies and laying out its violent cross-rhythms firmly and precisely. Best of all perhaps was the Beethoven Ninth. This was one of those uncommon moments in which the strictest adherence to the letter of the score had a liberating effect. Rarely has the scherzo been taken at such...