By David Perkins, Globe Correspondent
It’s a strange but undeniable fact that the great Requiems all have been composed by unbelievers. Consider the list: Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms, Fauré, Britten, and of course their great precursor, Mozart, whose Christian belief is up for discussion. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. A doubter is going to be more curious about his fate than the confidently saved. It’s more complicated than that, of course, there’s romantic-era egoism involved, and the sublime, and the 19th-century composer’s desire to compose a massive work that sums everything up. Some haven’t given up on that dream. In the 21st century, one might ask: Can a Requiem still speak to us?
The Chorus pro Musica devoted a concert on Friday at Old South Church to two “Masses for the dead,” Fauré’s sweet, short Requiem from 1889, and another, begun some 20 years ago, by the composer Roger Ames, “Requiem for Our Time,” in its first New England performance.
The latter is a huge, ambitious, 45-minute work, that intersperses poems by the late Boston confessional poet and suicide Anne Sexton, and others by Renée Neblett, with sections of the Latin Mass. Ames has confessed to having been heavily “influenced” by other composers. Indeed! One heard bits of Britten, Sondheim, and Verdi. In the “Dies Irae,” he steals from Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, making it a very bouncy “Days of Wrath.” The piece is well put-together, with choral sections that echo or amplify, in the style of a Greek chorus. In the “Liber Scriptus,” the priest (baritone David Murray) comes in fiercely on the Latin text, symbolically crushing the child in the poem that follows (sung by soprano Ilana Davidson). There are many high points, including a long, tormented “Tuba Mirum” for chorus alone.
Generally, however, Ames’s music fails to realize the despair in Sexton’s poems, which are all about being lost and on the verge of madness (she suffered from bipolar disorder), and vaguely longing for a lost Catholic belief. Ames sets these to pleasant, tonal music that could be from a Broadway musical, with easy and frequent returns to the tonic. The sequence of poems, moreover, doesn’t tell a story, or move toward clarity or wisdom. Neblett’s texts, solicited by Ames to add a “faith-filled view,” come a bit late and aren’t really convincing. The Latin text seems imposed to add grandeur and standing. (Practically, it is hard to follow the two languages at once, anyway.) The soloists and the chorus were splendid. The piece seemed, however, made-to-order and without conviction.
Fauré said he wrote his Requiem for “fun” and put into it everything he “entertained in the way of religious illusion.” The difference perhaps is that Fauré is really interested in humanity. You feel the warmth of tradition, of community, of love, in his music, and he gives his choice of Latin texts a deeply personal meaning by creating a conversational melodic line and using old modes. The soloists (Murray and Davidson again) and chorus sang sensitively, with especially fine work from the tenors. The small orchestra seemed thin in the “Sanctus” climax without trumpet and trombone. Jeffrey Rink’s leadership was clarifying and coherent.
Original link: http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2007/11/13/two_requiems_different_paths/