I have heard astoundingly few recordings of Cherbini’s greater-of-two requiems performed with such delicacy and conviction. (His other requiem, the D Minor, suffers from a church-enforced lack of female voices.) He wrote it for a memorial that the royalists had arranged for the beheaded King Louis XVII and Marie Antoinette, on the occasion of their re-entombment. Ironically, Cherubini was chief anthem writer of the Jacobins and Girondists twenty years prior. As they say, a gig’s a gig.
So dramatic is this requiem by this former opera composer that Beethoven bade that it be performed at his own memorial. And so it was. It features a gentle opening and wispy fadeout of the Introit and Kyrie, a spirited fugue in the Offertory, and, of course, the heart of any decent requiem: a fiery Dies Irae. Cherubini’s is firmly entrenched on that battlefield of immortality with Verdi’s and Mozart’s (actually on higher ground than Mozart’s). Parts of it sound like fragments from a rescue opera—he’d written several—but the core of it plunges a dagger of dread into the heart of most listeners, even you secular humanists in the third row. Pearlman gets world-class performances from his choristers – no soloists here—and the first-rate surround sonics have a fulsome cathedral sound without any nasty echoes. The variety of the movements is continuously enchanting. This may be the rosiest requiem ever written; even the Pie Jesu comes off as a sweet tribute rather than a font of grief. Stay tuned for the finale in the Agnes Dei. With a decent surround sound system, you’ll hear every aching, dwindling note. But wait! That’s not all. The disc also includes the melodically similar Elegiac Song (Beethoven) and Cherubini’s Marche Funèbre, a five-minute instrumental piece whose clanging tam tam, ceremonial theatricality, and protean dynamics serve as a curiously compelling companion piece.
— Peter Bates
