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The Polished Fire of Verdi's Requiem
| Article
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10814 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
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7 / 1986 |
1,347 Words |
| Author
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Emerson Randolph
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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.
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