Three other great recordings
Riccardo Muti
(conductor)
Riccardo Muti may have conducted the Requiem more often than anyone, with widely varying results. This first recording, from 1979, has a matchless team of soloists, and is in Muti’s most fiery manner. What impresses most is the end of the work, where – with no authorisation from the score – he slows up for the final desperate shrieks of the chorus and soprano, giving the impression that we are hurtling down a vast tube to destruction. It makes soprano Renata Scotto’s final desperate plea to be delivered from eternal death all the more moving, and concludes what may not be the most comprehensive account, but possibly the most thrilling. (Warner 098 0202)
Arturo Toscanini
(conductor)
It would be absurd to give a list of great performances of the Requiem without including its greatest exponent. There are quite a few recordings of Toscanini conducting the work, all live, but the finest is from new York’s Carnegie Hall in 1940. The sound is primitive but also undistorted, and the performance is so great that one feels sorry for anyone who can’t enjoy it. Toscanini
ensures a performance that is always incandescent, and – importantly – he has Jussi Björling as the sublime tenor soloist. (Music and Arts MACD1269)
Yuri Temirkanov
(conductor)
It is interesting and moving to see and hear Verdi’s Requiem performed on home ground. Recorded in 2011, the Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Regio di Parma, in the lovely eponymous opera house, really do sound authentic. Yuri Temirkanov conducts a broad but tense account, and the soloists contrive to sing as part of the collaborative effort, rather than as stars, though two of them – mezzo Sonia Ganassi and tenor Francesco Meli – are certainly that.
(C Major 728602)
And one to avoid… Victor de Sabata
(conductor)
There is a masterly ‘private’ recording of the Requiem that Victor de Sabata, one of the greatest of all Verdi conductors, made in 1950. Alas, before he made this later official recording for EMI in 1954, he had suffered a heart attack, and took the work at what were accurately described at the time as ‘positively grotesque tempi.’ De Sabata has a phenomenal set of soloists and everything should be fine, except that it sounds as if he is conducting from beyond the grave.