Canton Symphony Orchestra Offers Up a Sublime Verdi Requiem
By Tom Wachunas
Composed in 1873-74, Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa Da Requiem (Requiem Mass) poses a
wondrous irony. Verdi was openly disdainful of organized church worship. His
wife, Giuseppina, once characterized him as, “…not an outright atheist, but a
very doubtful believer.” It might seem,
then, counterintuitive that this acclaimed champion of worldly opera - who had
not composed any conventional sacred music since his youth - would render a
work of such profound religiosity.
But Verdi did
worship the luminary Italian poet and novelist, Alessandro Manzoni, whose work
was a galvanizing force in the movement for Italian unification and
independence. Soon after Manzoni’s death on May 22, 1873, Verdi visited the
grave and declared his intention to compose a requiem mass. The resulting
creation, for all its structural adherence to Catholic liturgical rites and
theological recitations, stands today as a masterpiece of deeply human
expressivity. So, had Verdi given us a strictly religious work, or a new
elaboration on the opera form? Critic and conductor Hans von Bülow was the
first among many to accept this requiem’s dual nature, calling it, “…Verdi’s
latest opera, though in ecclesiastical robes.”
Articulating the
right balance and clarity between orchestra, choirs, and soloists to navigate
Verdi’s dizzying spectrum of spiritual, psychological, and aural dynamics is a
particularly daunting endeavor. It is in fact a monumental challenge, and one
beautifully met on April 29 by the Canton Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along
with Malone University Chorale and Faith United Methodist Church Schola
Cantorum, all under the clearly impassioned baton of Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann. In full force was his sensitivity
to instrumental timbres matched to human voices, delivering the uncanny
sensation that brass and percussion can really talk, or that strings can
actually sing. Choir and ensemble were consistently mesmerizing in their dialogue.
The operatic nature
of the work is such that the choir can be regarded as witnesses to, or
commentators on the soloists, who are in turn presented as distinct characters on a journey to judgement
day. All of the soloists – Karen Foster
(Soprano), Kathryn Findlen
(Mezzo-Soprano), Tim Culver (Tenor), and
Nathan Stark (Bass) – were technically
superb, and their singing was invested with heartrending, soaring urgency as
well as palpable tenderness. There were only a few passages when the blending
of the soprano and mezzo-soprano tonalities and harmonies seemed unsure or
slightly out of sync. But such moments never diminished the visceral passion
and reverence that both of those soloists poured into, and in turn drew out of
the music.
Punctuated by the
bone-rattling cracks of bass drums, the recurring Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) interludes were a ferocious assault on psyche and soul. I’ve never heard the
orchestra and chorus so piercing, so unashamedly loud. More than once I thought
the walls of Umstattdt Performing Arts Hall were on the verge of collapse. Was
this God speaking his judgement, or Verdi intoning his own inconsolable rage at
human mortality?
In the end, soprano
and chorus united in a quiet, bittersweet prayer, Libera Me (Deliver Me), a plea to be saved from eternal death. As
the music faded into a suspended hush, the words of Immanuel Kant came to my
mind: “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the
mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has
pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the
attempt.”
Here, then, was the
Canton Symphony Orchestra in all its exquisite sublimity.
PHOTOS, from top:
Verdi drawing by me; Karen Foster, soprano; Kathryn Findlen, mezzo-soprano; Tim
Culver, tenor; Nathan Stark, bass
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