Giuseppe Verdi, for whom honour meant everything, wrote his Requiem to honour the memory of Alessandro Manzoni, the novelist he saw as representing the greatest of Italy's glories. Conducting the Requiem 130 years after the death of Manzoni, Sakari Oramo, with his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, seemed deeply conscious of the need to do right by Manzoni and thus honour Verdi's intentions.
This performance had a classical purity of intention and an almost baroque precision, a reminder that Manzoni's great novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), was set in the 17th century and that, in it, the monk and the cardinal do not condemn the young heroine Lucia but help her. From the almost imperceptible whispered opening of the cellos and the chorus's murmured prayers for eternal rest, the sound had an arresting clarity, allowing the words "te decet hymnus" to burst out gloriously. The CBS chorus was in splendid form, Oramo exhorting them to ever more expressive depiction of words, and their singing in the double fugue of the Sanctus was highly disciplined.
Perhaps predictably, the Dies Irae sequence was the most stirring, but not for the usual reasons. In Oramo's interpretation, it was the chill of the grave rather than the hellfire and damnation that struck terror in the heart: the bass-baritone Matthew Best uttering the words Mors stupebit with such a deathly shudder that the ringing brilliance of the trumpets proclaiming the day of judgment was instantly dissipated.
Mezzo Katarina Karnéus invested both the Liber scriptus and the Lacrimosa with a real intensity. The massive tone of the Finnish tenor Raimo Sirkiä would have been more impressive if it had been less forced, and it was unfortunate that, with the soprano Claire Weston, the quartet generally sounded ill-matched. Weston offered glimpses of thrilling sound, but more often her singing was marred by pulsing vibrato and unstable intonation.
It inevitably detracted from the impact of the final Libera me and from Verdi's ultimately consolatory message.
