A cohesive quartet struck the right note in this choral masterpiece
Verdi’s Requiem/ London Philharmonic Orchestra Royal Festival Hall
★★★★★
The London Philharmonic Orchestra has bagged Edward Gardner, the most exciting British conductor of his generation, to be its next principal conductor. Before he takes up the post in 2021, they’re giving their audience little glimpses of him, just enough to whet the appetite. Saturday night’s concert, in which he led the orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir and four soloists in Verdi’s Requiem, was one of them.
Verdi’s great cri de coeur seems more culturally remote with every passing year. Religious music these days means “spiritual”, ie something ethereal that gives an enjoyable sense of transcendence without raising any awkward questions about actual belief.
Verdi’s Requiem, by contrast, seems shot through with the anguish and terror of belief in almost every bar – or, rather, the struggle for belief, because Verdi was actually agnostic. Sometimes these feelings are expressed on a vast scale with offstage trumpets joining in with tumultuous choruses; at other points, they are wrapped in the most intimate utterances.
It has to be said that at Saturday’s performances, the latter sort worked better than the former. Admittedly, it’s difficult to create the right feeling of imminent apocalypse in the clean and clinical space of the Festival Hall. But somehow those great choral shouts of the Dies Irae didn’t raise the roof as they should, and the dizzying descents of the strings, which should make us feel as if we’re plunging into the infernal regions, seemed just too perfectly controlled.
It was elsewhere that the chorus really shone, as in the Lacrimosa, where the pleading melody in the tenors and basses underpinned the oppressed interjections of the soprano soloist. And later, they really seized the moment in the opening fugue in the Sanctus, the only moment of real joy in the entire piece. Verdi’s harmonies in this piece often take on an anguished searching quality, leading often to a momentarily consoling major-key harmony, and these were always exquisitely tuned.
As for the four soloists, it was astonishing what a cohesive sound they made, given the LPO had the double misfortune of two soloists dropping out at short notice, presumably because of illness. The original tenor was actually replaced twice, as the substitute named on the LPO’S website was replaced at the performance by Robert Murray. To arrive at the last minute and summon the right tranced tone in the Hostias
– one of those moments in the Requiem when everything hinges on a single note – was a tall order, but Murray managed it.
Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova plumbed a real depth of feeling in the Recordare, and soprano Iulia Maria Dann’s repeated pianissimo invocations Libera Me in the closing pages struck the right note of tender rapture. Good though all these were, they were cast in the shade by the majestic Hungarian bass Gábor Bretz. The moment when he completely changed his tone from the minatory hardness of “when the wicked are confounded” to a softer tone for “my heart contrite as ashes” was the evening’s most moving moment.