BERLIOZ: Requiem – Richard Lewis/ Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/ Sir Thomas Beecham – Pristine Audio

by | Mar 22, 2019 | Classical CD Reviews, Classical Reissue Reviews | 0 comments

BERLIOZ: La Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem), Op. 5 – Richard Lewis, tenor/Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/ Sir Thomas Beecham – Pristine Audio PACO 157, 78:48 [www.pristineclassical.com] *****:

Though an admitted agnostic, Hector Berlioz found a monumental sonic vehicle in his Requiem Mass of 1837, an expression, if not of religious conviction, a genuine awe and dread of death, and a potent exercise of the imagination to color a faith in Man’s creative capacities.   Berlioz seizes the Dies Irae, particularly, as a dramatic core, spreading its message into five of the work’s ten sections, and embracing any number of conflicting human emotions – love and hate, grief and acceptance, violence and compassion – as a composite of the human personality, given that Romantic urge for contradiction that defines the “world process.” Berlioz may well have striven to replace in art what he considered an absent God, communicating his nervous struggle to find aesthetic consolation in an otherwise indifferent universe. While the model Berlioz followed may well have been that of Cherubini’s Requiem in D minor (1816), Berlioz retained his own, eccentrically lavish style, demanding wild and convulsive gestures, something of the “Napoleonic” scale of the times. The Requiem meant to pay homage to the seventh anniversary of the Revolution of 1830.

In the course of the imposing architecture, Berlioz proffers a Tuba mirem – the call to Judgment Day –  that employs four brass orchestras, a deployment of a dozen cornets, trumpets, trombones, tubas, all to effect a sense of holy terror.  These forces recur in the Rex tremendae and in the Lacrymosa, in which the use of syncopation reinforces the gaping of the pit.  Such massive music demands a spacious venue, and Beecham for this recording (13 December 1959) has the Royal Albert Hall and its opportunities for antiphonal resonance, where the soft tissue of the human voices plays off against the stringent punishments inflicted by the brass.  But no less effective, the appeals for light, the light of mercy, urge themselves in equally lulling moments, say, in the opening Requiem et Kyrie, where tender contemplation precedes the passionate uproar of the explosive Dies Irae.  We can well appreciate Beecham’s exemplary focus and balancing of textures: the Offertoire, which Berlioz considered the masterstroke of the work, posits a kind of Purgatory, which obsesses in the chorus on two notes, A and B-flat, while shifting harmonies (contrapuntally) manage to keep our dramatic interest.  Beecham brings out the music’s economy of means while directing us to the modal shift from D minor into D Major.

Portrait Berlioz

Hector Berlioz

Beecham had often employed the lyrical services of tenor Richard Lewis (1914-1990), whose versatility and physical stamina accommodated many music styles, including performances of The Dream of Gerontius, Messiah, and Das Lied von der Erde) with Kathleen Ferrier). The sense of spiritual strain in Lewis’ tessitura for the heavenly Sanctus complements the unearthly sound Berlioz fashions for his previous Hostias, in which the timbral sound of flute and trombone proffer a sense of uneasy balance between salvation and the abyss. The absence of the Benedictus from the Sanctus intensifies the perspective Berlioz takes on the more universal repercussions of his vision, urging the many layers of the double fugue of the Sanctus. The Agnus dei provides a sense of cyclical closure, with the words Te decet hymnus repeated verbatim from the opening of the score. A mixed emotion of awe and solace arises, with drums tattoed in a funeral march under six amen cadences amidst string arpeggios that aim to a G Major resolution.

Recording engineer Andrew Rose has added a degree of ambient stereo to augment the original radio transmission of the BBC, providing us with glimpses of sonic and spiritual grandeur from the most “individual” of sacred pieces by a composer passionately searching for the transcendent.

–Gary Lemco

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