Recommends...
Howard Goodall
EMI artist and Classic FM composer-in-residence Howard Goodall gives us his personal choices for recommended listening from the EMI Classics catalogue:
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Recorded in the translucently clear acoustic of Boxgrove Priory, near Chichester, in 1989 and 1990, these two Sixteen recordings, now combined into one helpful box, of the two masterpiece Latin masses of William Byrd, the greatest of all English Renaissance composers, is a truly beautiful thing.
These ravishingly lovely masses would have been composed for performance at private – indeed secret – services for Catholics during the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth 1st, so the relatively intimate scale and sound of The Sixteen feels absolutely spot on for the works. Up to the 1980s, the way you’d expect to hear Renaissance polyphony like this on record was in vast, cavernous cathedrals and chapels, so the interwoven part-writing was lost in a swimming, echoey, wash of sound.
The Sixteen – along it has to be said with Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, whose building allowed no reverberation at all – redefined how we listened to this exquisite, delicate music, bringing out all the subtlety and nuance of the writing. There is also a rare recording on this CD of Byrd’s richly modern-sounding anthem Diliges Dominum.
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This was the recording that introduced me to the Fauré Requiem, as I suspect it did for a whole generation of music lovers, and as a teenager the vinyl version of it was rarely off my bedroom record player – I must have played it a thousand times. In contrast to the Byrd Masses, this piece was written to be performed in France’s enormous medieval cathedrals with their awesome, lush Cavaillé-Coll organs (Fauré himself was organist and choirmaster at Paris’ Église de la Madeleine, and before that assistant at the grandiose Saint-Sulpice basilica), and the closest thing we have to that in the UK are the chapels of King’s and Trinity Colleges in Cambridge, where these recordings were made.
The singing is precise without being clinical, deliciously smooth without being sentimental and it has the added bonus of Bob Chilcott’s fragile boy treble solo in the Pie Jesu – for those of us who are friends of the now mature composer it is a poignant reminder of the chorister origins of so many fine musicians.
It is paired on the CD with the gorgeous plainsong-inspired Duruflé Requiem (my personal favourite of all the great Requiems), written over half a century later than the Fauré, though not as stylistically distant as that sounds: the French cathedral chorister tradition being a relatively stable style in the early 20th century. It disappeared completely, choirs and all, within a decade of the Duruflé piece’s premiere (1947), which makes the contribution of English choirs in cherishing these French choral masterworks in the period since doubly meaningful. I hope the music in heaven is as good as this.
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The Verdi Requiem is stylistically about as far from the restraint of the Fauré and Duruflé settings as it is possible to get: it is, not surprisingly, by far the most operatic of all the famous Requiems and calls for appropriately large-scale forces in pulling it off. The combination of A list international soloists here, with a robust, mature orchestral chorus, a big-time conductor and some seriously powerful, bone-shaking moments is the blueprint for how to do this piece, notwithstanding the dramatically hushed, stage-whisper-style opening. They are only teasing.
When the Dies Irae kicks off, there is never any doubt that hell & damnation really are awaiting us on the other side. Indeed, the fury of the singing & playing is so huge at times that even the digital remastering geniuses at Abbey Road cannot completely disguise the fact that the original recording gear couldn’t always handle it. Most of all, despite the presence of a roll-call of the jet-set star singers of the 60s from across the globe, this is an Italian reading of Verdi’s epic Messa da Requiem.
Recorded in the year that the Beatles had their first no.1, at the Kingsway Hall in London, home of so many landmark recordings and demolished in 1999, it sounds to my ears like the last of an ‘old-fashioned’ type of performance, all swagger, pomp and emotion and it hits the nail firmly on the head because of it. I imagine this is the recording Verdi himself would have liked best. Spine-chilling stuff.
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It took until 2007 for me to find a recording of the wonderful Brahms Requiem that I really adored, one that did justice to this, the odd-one-out of the Classical-Romantic Requiems. All the other Requiem settings are based on the concept that a Requiem Mass is a plea – by the living – for the souls of the departed that they don’t take a wrong turning after purgatory and end up enduring eternal damnation. Brahms moves away from the traditional liturgical text in both language and meaning, opting instead to comfort those who mourn, a template many other composers since – myself included – have followed.
So the Brahms has a quite different mood to the Verdi even though they were written within five years of each other. The reason I love this (live) recording is the coming together of two superlative English directors – Rattle (conducting) and Halsey (who directs the choir) – with the magnificent Philharmoniker orchestra (whose recent history was as cultural standard-bearer of the old West Berlin) and the reborn Rundfunkchor (which grew up in the old East Berlin) – the recording fuses the technical mastery of German singing and playing with Rattle’s unabashed emotionality and it is electrifying as a result.
For me, it is as if the piece Brahms wrote is at last being revealed for what it is – calm, determined and direct without a hint of wallowing. Rattle conducts it like it’s a choral symphony, not a mass – which is what it has been all along, it took this performance to reveal it, in such style. |
There is one great litmus test for all performances and recordings of Poulenc’s quirkily attractive sacred choral music and that is the opening soprano entry at the beginning of his Christmas anthem O Magnum Mysterium: this moment is the definitive measure of how good the choir is. Can the sopranos glide in effortlessly on that pianissimo top F, like a falcon hovering over a snow-covered field, or is there a swoop, a catch, a rough edge? Do any of the sopranos hesitate to take the plunge, so that you hear one voice nudge in before the other? Is it really quiet or just ‘pretend’ quiet?
For me, The Sixteen’s glorious sopranos pass this test with flying colours and the anthem is transcendentally beautiful. There are so many highlights in this collection – the Lent anthem Tristis est anima mea, with its achingly exposed opening soprano solo, has never been sung better. Aussi bas que la silence, from Poulenc’s cantata for unaccompanied double chorus, Figure Humaine, with its quicksand-like shifting block chords has an assurance that only choirs with total familiarity with a wide range of repertoire, from Gabrieli to Pärt, can fully realise (Poulenc’s own eclectic tastes are a distinct feature of his style).
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Janet Baker’s singing of Mahler’s songs with orchestra were the key that emotionally opened the composer up to me when I was a music student. Words cannot describe how powerfully they affect me still. Is it the extreme vulnerability with which she fills her voice in her interpretation of these masterpieces? Every note of this recording is both sublime and heart-breaking. Barbirolli’s empathy for the music of a turn-of-the-century Czech Jew is extraordinary, as extraordinary as the rapport between conductor and singer on this disc; every pause and hesitation, every breath and gesture of the voice is symbiotically mirrored in the orchestra, as if they are one organism – much rarer an achievement than is commonly presumed. Mahler didn’t write a Requiem, but the Songs on the Death of Children is the nearest thing we have to it – and being the supremely honest composer that he was, there is no easy consolation for the bereaved – no platitudes of redemption or false reassurance. This is music of bruised, intelligent candour: loss is painted as the terrible nightmare it is for those that are left behind. So far, for me, only Baker and Ferrier have come close to finding this essence in their voice – the other great sopranos sing Mahler like he’s an opera composer and they are Tosca, Desdemona or Brünnhilde. Mahler may have been the finest music director ever of the Vienna Staatsoper, but he was not an opera composer. His songs are not those of fictional characters, acting out their agonies on a stage, but the keening of living souls devastated by earthly sadness – from Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n to Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen this CD contains the most powerful music of grief ever made.
