Berlioz New
Grande messe des morts, Op. 5. Cinq pièces sacrées.
John Mark Ainsley (tenor); Montreal Symphony Chorus and Orchestra/Charles Dutoit.
Decca 458 921-2 (full price, two discs, 1 hour 50 minutes). Producer Chris Hazell. Engineers Jonathan Stokes, Simon Eadon. Date May 28th-30th, 1997.
Comparisons:
RPO/Beecham (BBC Legends) BBCL4011-2
LSO/C. Davis (Philips) 416 283-2
BPO/Levine (DG) 429 724-2
Boston SO/Ozawa (RCA) 09026 62544-2
Were the music were not witness enough, Berlioz's vivid account of the
first performance of the Grande messe des morts in his Memoirs
makes it clear how much this tremendous work was written for an ancient,
dignified building (in his case, the Invalides), for a ceremony in which
lofty architecture should be complemented with vast and noble music. It
has sounded wonderful beneath the echoing dome of St Paul's Cathedral
in London; one of the most powerful performances I have ever heard was
in last year's Ryedale Festival, when the whole of York Minster seemed
to throb like a mighty sounding board. How, then, can any recording hope
to capture this response between music and a great building, to reflect
the sense of occasion which was part of the French Revolutionary tradition
that gave such music birth?
It is remarkable how well some of the finest recorded performances succeed. The recent BBC reissue of Beecham's 1959 Royal Albert Hall performance, the last of Berlioz's music he was to conduct, conveys the sense of a momentous event as well as the hand of an old master directing it. Colin Davis's 1969 recording, made in Westminster Cathedral, remains a classic, a performance charged with drama and also with a sense of the work's formidable challenge. Those conductors who shirk the risks are always the ones delivering the least — who dares, wins and among those settling for a fatal smoothness are Seiji Ozawa and James Levine. Charles Dutoit, recording in St. Jérome, Montreal, is also no risk-taker. He proves most successful with the gentler movements, and in particular towards the end with the Sanctus — lovely singing from John Mark Ainsley — and the Agnus Dei. Earlier, there can be a timidity that has the opening 'Requiem aeternam' and Kyrie too rigid, with the rhythm constricted and failing to breathe, and that loses the snap and urgency of the 'Lacrymosa' and the exultant, ferocious thrust of the 'Rex tremendae': where is the sheer horror of 'de profundo lacu'? The 'Dies irae', famously the most sensational movement of the work, is cautious, with no sense of alarm in the gradual harmonic build-up and with the four brass bands labouring rather than riding the storm like horsemen of the apocalypse.
Though the original Davis of 1969 remains by some way the most exciting and rewarding of the recorded performances of the Requiem, there is extra interest for Berliozians on this latest set. Dutoit includes two beautiful little arrangements of Bortnyansky for unaccompanied voices ('inspiration douce et solennelle', as Hugh Macdonald quotes Berlioz himself on the Cherubic Hymn, Adoremus te, in his excellent but too brief insert notes), and the charming Veni creator and Tantum ergo. It seems strange to have filled the record out with the Resurrexit, a piece which Berlioz retained from his discarded Messe solennelle of 1824 and variously reworked. The Mass was discovered in 1991, and performed and recorded in 1994; the version recorded here differs only in detail. It would have made a more coherent group of works to have recorded some of the other minor religious choral pieces such as the Chant sacré, or the pretty Prière du matin for children's choir with piano, or even the admittedly duller Hymne pour la consécration du nouveau tabernacle.
John
Warrack
used by permission
