A thoughtful requiem for modern times

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Lucerne Easter Festival

It’s a brave composer who attempts to write a requiem. Those ancient Latin texts still vibrate with meaning, but few believe in them. The days when composers could raise a heaven-storming dim to summon the terrors of the Last Judgment, as Verdi did in his Requiem, are long gone.

Last night we heard a remarkable attempt to create a requiem for modern times by leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm. His Requiem-Strophen (Requiem-Strophes) were performed at the Lucerne Easter Festival by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under conductor Mariss Jansons.

To set the mood, we first heard Rihm’s recent short Gruss-Moment (Greeting 2), a memorial to the firebrand modernist composer Pierre Boulez, who died last year. It unfolded like a series of grave litanies, a mournful woodwind solo on one side answered by harp and brass on the other. Boulez’s own memorial piece for Bruno Maderna was quoted, and the shadow of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, with its pure sound-world of flutes and harp, lay over everything.

The same mood lay over much of Requiem-Strophen. Rihm interspersed the Latin text with meditations culled from Michelangelo’s premonitions of his own mortality, and more serene views of the hereafter from German poets. These were sung by the superb three soloists, who showed they really had this angular music in their bones.

The music was not all dark; the two sopranos Mojca Erdmann and Anna Prohaska were sometimes entwined in sensuous, almost late-romantic music.

Rihm’s new piece is deeply felt and subtly made; let’s hope it comes to the UK soon.