Talk about drama! From the touch-your-soul-awake opening "Requiem" (Eternal rest) until the closing stay-vigilant morendo "Libera me" (Deliver me), Guiseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem, as performed by the American Symphony Orchestra and nine massed choruses under conductor Peter Tiboris at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall on May 4, was sheer fire.
The initial andante of Verdi's Requiem rises in a hush, sotto voce. The first word of the work is exchanged by the upper and lower voices of massive chorus with the kind of apprehension you would expect of two nearly tongue-tied friends who finish each other's sentences as they intercede, shocked, on behalf of a beloved third who has been suddenly and unexpectedly condemned.
Tiboris' execution of the massive score by one of the Italian tradition's most dramatically powerful composers was alive with such sincerity as must transport any expression, even the ostensibly profane, into the realm of what is eternally meaningful and therefore sacred.
The Requiem is not a profane work, of course, although Verdi, a declared agnostic, might have hesitated to identify it as other than secular.
Be that as it may, the Requiem clearly is an incomparable outpouring of the conviction and understanding of a man who, if not of professed religious belief, is spiritually aware of human life and trial (that is clear enough from Verdi's operatic works) and therefore, inevitably, concerned with questions of life and afterlife.
In the restrained opening moments--in which Tiboris exhibited a noteworthy capacity for containing the enormous forces called for by this remarkable opus: a full orchestra, soloists, three hundred voices onstage, and another hundred in each of the front most lateral balconies--there seemed to breathe a sensation one could expect to experience if one were looking on from another realm to hear all of the world weeping for all of the world. This was most palpable as the momentary canonic surge carrying the text "Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion" (Thou art deserving of the hymn that praises thee in Zion) quieted into the reserved tones of the opening moments with the words "Ad te omnis caro veniet" (Unto thee shall all flesh go at last) in the descent into the F major chord of rest preceding the recurrence of the opening motive.
Verdis's stentorian setting of the cries for mercy that fill the Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy), the second half of the Requiem's opening movement, rings of the kind of sobriety one cannot help imaging the composer felt upon the writing of this concert mass, certainly one of the works most intensely representative of the seriousness of his own quest for answers to eternal questions.
As tenor soloist Efren Puig began the Kyrie, which calls for solo quartet and full chorus, he established the character of the work that would be done by each of the soloists throughout the evening. Puig, mezzo-soprano Paula Liscio, soprano Nicole Philibosian, and bass Peter Loehle all sang with magnificent clarity and consistency of tone throughout the Requiem, which, like each of the leading roles in Verdi's operas, demands extraordinary control and interpretive investment.
A case in
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