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The Times, September 2, 2012 |
Richard Morrison |
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Verdi: Messa da Requiem, Luzern, 29. August 2012 |
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Messa da Requiem, Lucerne
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5 stars |
Faith is the theme of this summer’s Lucerne Festival. But it didn’t require
a great leap of it to make the journey for this performance of Verdi’s
Requiem. If you were to devise a dream casting for this most theatrical of
sacred masterpieces you might well come up with Anja Harteros, Elina
Garanca, Jonas Kaufmann and René Pape, plus the Chorus and Orchestra of La
Scala, Milan, under their current maestro, Daniel Barenboim.
I would
love to know how much the Swiss paid to bring that lot together, even for
one night. My back-of-the- programme calculation suggests little change out
of £200,000. But with Lucerne’s punters prepared to pay up to £215 a ticket
(and pay night after night for more than a month), this is a festival that
can demand and get the best.
And I was blown away by this Requiem.
One could quibble about the melodramatic gaps that Barenboim inserted,
particularly in the Dies Irae, or his way of lurching quite literally into
the faces of his soloists to impose on them not only his general view of the
work, but also a highly romanticised, note-by-note articulation as well. But
when one’s spine is tingling almost continuously for 90 minutes, quibbles
simply don’t register.
Highlights? Kaufmann’s first entry was
like an erupting volcano. Garanca was as mesmerising, floating
creamy legatos while mustering a thrilling chest voice that I never thought
she possessed. Harteros, looking like a distressed pre-Raphaelite beauty,
turned the final movement into the most sublime death scene never to appear
in an opera. And that incredible chorus, with their barrel-voiced basses and
wonderfully hammy rolled consonants and gasped aspirates, hurled out the
apocalyptic moments as if determined to blast the roof off Jean Nouvel’s
concert-hall. Add the loudest bass-drum player in the world and you will
understand why I’m still reeling. The festival continues for another
fortnight.
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