Last year was the 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch. The centrepiece of the events honouring one of the Netherlands’ greatest artists was a wonderfully comprehensive exhibition of his surviving paintings in his native city of Den Bosch, but the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra paid tribute, too, commissioning its current “house composer” Detlev Glanert to create a large-scale choral work on the subject of the painter. Markus Stenz conducted the premiere of Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch in St John’s Cathedral in Den Bosch last November, and it was repeated the following evening in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, where this recording was made.
This is by no means a straightforward liturgical requiem, though. The Latin text of the requiem mass still provides Glanert with the structural framework, but into it he has incorporated passages from Carmina Burana, the 13th-century collection of medieval poems and songs – also in Latin – as the soul of Hieronymus Bosch is brought to be judged and accused of the seven deadly sins. There are 18 sections; a speaker is Bosch’s accuser, calling him to account for himself before each judgment, while two choirs represent his soul – a small group mostly sings the requiem texts while the larger one combines with the four soloists to describe the sins, and then all of the forces unite for the final section, In Paradisum.
The Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch is an outstanding choral achievement, a work of great power and intensely vivid invention, which uncannily finds musical parallels to Bosch’s surreal imagination, and to the extremes of his visions of heaven and hell, grandeur and intimacy. The score juxtaposes glimpses of the apocalypse with moments of extreme sweetness, in intensely detailed choral and orchestral writing that consistently avoids all the cliches that disfigure so many contemporary oratorios.
The performance under Stenz has tremendous dramatic intensity, with David Wilson-Johnson as the speaker setting the tone at the start with his terrifying summons to the artist. There is also immense choral singing, with soprano Aga Mikolaj steepling thrillingly over the top of it, and immaculate playing by the RCO.
