Review: Mozart Requiem (Britten Sinfonia & Daniel Hyde)

On Friday The Cambridge Music Festival presented the Britten Sinfonia (Conductor, Daniel Hyde), with the Choir of King’s College Cambridge in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem.

The event was sold out, and hardly surprising given the pedigree of the performers with soloists Mary Bevan (soprano), Avery Amereau (mezzo), Andrew Staples (tenor) and Neal Davies (bass).

Mozart died before he could complete this work, and a huge industry of music scholarship would subsequently emerge exploring its genesis. Scholars have had to penetrate thickets of theories involving conflicting speculations and affirmations about which parts of the Requiem were written by whom and when, and many attached apocryphal stories.

The Roman Catholic Mass has been a source of inspiration to composers over the centuries. It commemorates the Last Supper when Christ presiding over bread and wine, ‘transformed’ it into his body and blood, saying ‘As often as you shall do these things, you shall do them in memory of me.’

‘Transubstantiation’ is an issue of contention to this day. Dissenters from the ‘old religion’ (Catholicism) said that Christ’s words meant that the bread and wine was a ‘representation’ of his body and blood, no more, and that Catholic belief in the ‘real presence’ was just ‘hocus pocus’, the term deriving from the Latin phrase ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’ - ‘for this is my body.’

A ‘Requiem’, the Latin word for ‘rest,’ is a special Mass to honour someone who has died, and is the first word in its commencement, ‘Requiem aeternum dona eis’ – ‘Eternal rest grant unto them’.

Mozart’s Requiem stands high in any list of Masses for the departed, among which are placed pre-eminently Brahms’s A German Requiem which takes texts from both Old and New Testaments and employs the German language; the more operatic endeavours of Berlioz (Grande Messe des morts) and Verdi (Messa da requiem); and Fauré whose Requiem is represented as more a blessed deliverance than cause for sorrow and grief.

The years 1944-48 saw the composition of Stravinsky’s brief Mass (inspired by Mozart Masses and performed immediately before the interval at Friday’s concert), while the year 1962 saw a major work in Britten’s War Requiem deploying the poetry of Wilfred Owen within sections of the traditional Latin Mass.

As for Mozart himself, he was able to complete the opening ‘Requiem’ as well as the ‘Kyrie’ with its transcendent music placed among the Introit, Gradual and Tract of the composition.

Elsewhere he sketched out voice parts and bass lines as far as the lovely melodic ‘Hostias’ in the famous ‘Dies Irae’ sequence, and a few bars of the affecting ‘Lacrimosa’ in that same sequence.

After his untimely death, Mozart’s wife Constanze asked his pupil Joseph Eybler to finish the Requiem’s score, but part of the received wisdom is that the incomplete manuscript was passed over by him to another of Mozart’s pupils, Süssmayr, who completed in his own hand the ‘Sanctus’, ‘Agnus Dei’ & ‘Communion’.

The Requiem had been commissioned by composer Count Franz von Walsegg to commemorate his late wife. Eventually, Constanze persuaded Walsegg to acknowledge Mozart as the composer.

The concert’s participants alike made for a memorable rendition of both Stravinsky’s Mass (possibly unfamiliar to many, and a small masterpiece) and Mozart’s Requiem. The distinguished Britten Sinfonia had introduced the concert with a splendid performance of Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, before being joined by the world-renowned King’s Choristers to reveal their combined power and glory in the two choral compositions.

There were many intervals in the main work of the evening which, under the sure-handed direction of Daniel Hyde, commanded attention.

Singled out as noteworthy, might have been the contributions of the soloists and brass in ‘tuba mirum,’ the wonderfully achieved choral effect of ‘Rex tremendae majestatis,’ the beautiful mezzo and bass, soprano and tenor voices in ‘Recordare, Jesu’, the powerful male chorus answered by the nuanced female voices in ‘Confutatis maledictus’, and the ‘weeping’ strings and ominous drum of perhaps the most well-loved sequence of the Requiem, the ‘Lacrimosa.’

The four high profile soloists, lending their outstanding talents to this lovely composition sang mainly as a quartet in the majority of the texts as required, while the individually accomplished musicians of the Britten Sinfonia and the King’s Choristers combined to make some powerful statements; as in the ‘Sanctus’ segment of the Stravinsky Mass and the ‘Confutatis maledictis’ of the Requiem. But there were many such memorable passages.

It was not difficult to feel sorrow at how the creator of this beautiful and beautifully delivered work had been taken at the age of 35, and to feel, too, with added poignancy his Requiem’s relevance to our, each and everyone’s, inescapable fate.

The centuries-old college chapel offered us an invitation as the appropriate place perhaps to reflect on the great names of the past, Mozart’s among them, for whom death had come prematurely. Our thoughts on such occasions are almost inevitably drawn to think of the even greater achievements that could yet have been theirs’. This final work not only accentuates the tragic and untimely loss of the creative genius in Mozart himself, but it also strikingly reveals the extent to which we are left the poorer for that loss. JOHN GILROY