Missa Solemnis, Verdi Requiem, Berlioz Requiem, Messiah, German Requiem, St. John Passion, Mozart Requiem -- the great, mountaintop orchestral choral works. And you know one thing that binds them all together for us? They're all a lot of really hard work. The Mozart Requiem is not as long as some, but there's a ton of loud, athletic singing -- and for the sopranos there are an awful lot of those pianissimo high notes that are so hard for them. I remember many years ago when I first did the Mozart Requiem, my first thought was, "OK, some Mozart. This will be nice and easy". And then "What the HECK?? Repeated sevenths up and down?? This melisma keeps changing chromatically! This is not easy." And the rehearsals are particularly tough: one really loud, gut-buster chorus after another -- six repetitions through each chorus and no break for the soloists. And then, "REX! ... REX!".
Give me a break! Actually, in the rehearsals, breaks are few and far between.
So what kind of a performance was it? Well, it was pretty damn good. Better than that. Kind of incredible. We were a big chorus (somewhere around 140) -- and we were well rehearsed, accurate, passionate -- and really, really good. I'm sorry, it may seem self-serving -- but that's what I thought. And I haven't found anyone who disagrees. Then there were the soloists. Each one of them is a wonderful talent on their own -- but together, their ensemble was absolutely stunning. It sounded like they were born together.
About the Requiem itself -- conventional musicology has it that Mozart only wrote a bit of the orchestration, roughed out the choral parts for some of the sections -- and other entire sections were invented entirely by Süssmyer, who was given the commission to complete the work by Mozart's widow, Constanza. Hans Graf, however, doubts the substance of this, and I have to agree. As a specific example, supposedly the entire Agnus Dei was written by Süssmyer. But just listen to, or if you are lucky sing, the second occurance of the text "dona nobis pacem" (measure 25 and following). Six bars of utter genius, profoundly moving. I cannot believe that this was the work of a composer who wrote nothing else of any note. This was the radiance of God speaking through his chosen one ... Mozart. It just has to be. Graf tells us that Constanza gave Süssmyer a stack of notes ... and those notes have never been seen again. I think we can guess what happened: Süssmyer used them and claimed the work as his own. Not that one should minimize the importance of what Süssmyer did, realizing the Requiem from fragments and notes. But the sections that Süssmyer supposedly composed himself tend to be short, wonderful passages that are repeated a couple of times with minor variations -- and then stop as soon as decently possible.
Mozart. Rest in Peace.
We also performed, to start the concert, a stand-alone fragment Kyrie. Presumably Mozart had some other mass in mind when he wrote it, but it never got used in a larger setting. In rehearsal the work seemed -- kind of OK -- but when we started singing with the orchestra it came alive and was wonderful. That guy Mozart really knew how to use instruments and voices together effectively.
The concert audiences were all pretty large and they were extremely appreciative. We did good.
Oh yeah, one other thing. We did the Mozart Requiem under Graf four or five years ago, and in fact they made a "sort-of commercial" recording of it. ("Sort of" because I think it was only distributed to performers and perhaps some donors). To be honest I didn't like that recording very much. I'm not sure quite why, but in rehearsal Graf said that he listened to it, was not satisfied and changed his interpretation. My score still had the markings from the old performance, and it was amazing how many times I had to erase markings and put new ones in. I'm not sure in detail how his new interpretation differed from the old, but I sure enjoyed it a lot.