Cherubini - Requiem

Ludwig van Beethoven (Composer), Luigi Cherubini (Composer), Martin Pearlman (Conductor), Boston Baroque (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Boston Baroque
• Conductor: Martin Pearlman
• Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven, Luigi Cherubini
• Audio CD (January 23, 2007)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Telarc
• ASIN: B000LPR4PI
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #93,157 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Cherubini's C minor Requiem, full of drama and austere beauty, is a masterpiece of 19th-century choral and church music. Although famous for his operas, Cherubini did not include vocal solos in the work (nor in the D minor Requiem for male chorus composed in his later years). The opening Kyrie is swathed in soft mystery, the Domine Jesu and the Offertory's final Amen have sturdy rhythmic underpinnings, and the Requiem's finale features a closing diminuendo as powerful as it is surprising. Cherubini opens the Dies Irae with a stupendous tam-tam crash, shocking to its first audiences and still packing a wallop, especially as captured by Telarc's engineers. In the Marche Funèbre, which follows the Requiem on this disc, Cherubini returned to the tam-tam, along with brass and percussion for a stirring, sad march. The disc opens with Beethoven's rarely performed, quietly effective short Elegiac Song. Pearlman and his period instrument band and chorus are exemplary throughout. Tempos are apt, the orchestra plays with feeling, without the annoying tics heard from many such ensembles, and the well-drilled chorus sings with color and delicacy, as well as with a wide dynamic range. --Dan Davis

Product Description

Cherubini's Requiem in C minor, by turns ethereal, highly dramatic and ultimately transcendent, was triumphantly premiered on January 21, 1817 in a memorial concert below the abbey church of St. Denis to commemorate the anniversary of the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The bodies of the long deposed monarchs had been searched for and found a few years earlier and were finally being laid to rest in the crypt of St. Denis. Though held in the highest esteem by many of the greatest composers of his time, this first of Cherubini's two Requiems fell into obscurity by the end of the 19th century. The new recording gives the work a new lease on life and invites listeners who have long treasured - and even helped popularize - the great and varied Requiems by composers such as Mozart, Brahms, Fauré, Verdi and even Britten to discover a deeply satisfying and unjustly neglected masterpiece. Cherubini's Requiem is scored for chorus and orchestra, but, surprisingly, does not feature vocal soloists. As Martin Pearlman observes, "It is as if the composer has distanced himself as far as possible from his other life in opera." Violins are omitted in the opening two movements, creating an especially somber orchestral color. A single dramatic stroke of the tam-tam (gong) at the opening of the Dies irae (Day of wrath) is no doubt the work's most famous moment (or perhaps infamous, as some early listeners found it ill-suited for a religious work)-- and must have terrified listeners at the work's premiere. Also notable is the work's unusual ending, where the music fades away in a long, haunting diminuendo that Berlioz said, "surpasses anything of the kind that has been written." The new album opens, appropriately, with another rarely heard work of transcendent cast, Beethoven's sublime Elegiac Song, Op. 118. Written in the summer of 1814 for a friend whose wife had died in childbirth, the simple anonymous text, sung in German, is tenderly set by the composer: Gently, as you lived, thus have you died, too holy for sorrow! Let no eye shed tears for the heavenly spirit's return home. As Martin Pearlman explains in the liner notes, "Beethoven composed this small gem at the beginning of a difficult time in his life, a period in which he produced a few major works but appeared to be rethinking his musical vocabulary...While the Elegiac Song can hardly be said to anticipate the style of the late quartets, it does reflect a sense of searching, a sense that nothing is conventional, even in a small pièce d'occasion."

An additional Cherubini work, the March funèbre (1820), closes the album in dramatic fashion. Referring to its repeated gong strokes and "passionate dissonances," Martin Pearlman observes, "As we might expect from a march, this is ceremonial music, very different in spirit from the profoundly emotional Requiem, and it indulges much more freely in theatrical effects."

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They All Agreed...Cherubini was great., December 23, 2007

By 

Samuel Stephens "aka "Hector"" (TN, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Cherubini - Requiem (Audio CD)

Ok, so if you aare new to choral music, this may not be the best way into it...as the two reviewers above can testify. But let there be no doubts about it, this IS great music. If Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms and Wagner can all agree on something (as the CD blurb tells us), you know it has to be good. Well, they all admired this composer (Cherubini), and this work in particular. If you think this work occasionaly sounds like another composer, then you have it backwards. Other composers sound like Cherubini. Even Beethoven looked up to him.

This reading by the Boston Baroque is superb: as far as mainstream performances go, there are few better than this.

I'm still a little confused by the lukewarm reaction by the two above reviewers; perhaps Cherubini is more of a composer's composer, rather than a people's composer? I personally think he is accessible. Enjoy this music.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The greatest piece ever composed, July 24, 2011

By 

Lobsang Kalden - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cherubini - Requiem (Audio CD)

I look and look in vain to find something as divine, as perfectly formal, as expressive and as transcendental as this work. It is to my taste the greatest forty minutes of music ever composed. It is not surprising that Beethoven thought the setting of Cherubini's requiem even better than Mozart's and said that if he ever wrote a requiem, he would have taken Cherubini's as his model. It is also not suprising that this work has remained in obscurity for such a long time: truth and beauty have a way to be so subtle that few can gain access to their escence. Anyone who has heard this work can count himsef/herself lucky to have been chosen by the most elevated spirit to participate in the sublimity of this work. Brahms, Shumman, Wagner, and Beethoven, they all admire the artistic power of this extraordinary work. It really has no equal.
The advantage of Martin Pearlman's version is that the work is set to a slightly faster tempo that other versions, which brings excitement and force to Cherubini's masterpiece. Also the voices do not sound muddy as in other versions but instead the clarity of interpretation is one of its most salient features.
To listen to this work is to bridge the distance between the earthly and the divine, between phenomena and the transcendent, between time and eternity. If anyone ever thought that Eric Clapton was God it is because they had never heard Cherubini's requiem. This is what music is all about. It is as good as it gets and better. Cherubini is a modern Prometheus who stole the fire of love from God herself but, unlike his predecessor, he got away with it.

8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pleasant enough, but not great music, February 14, 2007

By 

Teemacs (Switzerland) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cherubini - Requiem (Audio CD)

Having enjoyed Martin Pearlman's excellent account of the Monteverdi Vespers and seeing this recommended to me by amazon.com as a result, I thought I'd try it, never having heard it (or, for that matter, heard of it). The Requiem is unusual in that it uses no soloists, purely orchestral and choral forces. Pearlman and the Boston Baroque do an excellent job, as one would expect, but the music is, to my ears, good, but not great. It is pleasantly listenable, but it is simply not the thing you (well, OK, I) would drag out for repeated listenings. It lacks that certain stamp of greatness that characterises the great religious masterpieces (Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers, the B Minor Mass, the Bach Passions, the Haydn and Mozart masses, the Missa Solemnis). "Music," said Beethoven, "should strike fire from a man's soul." My soul remained unstruck, never mind unfired.