Customer Reviews

Cherubini - Requiem

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

There is no knocking here of Martin Pearlman and The Boston Baroque.They are top notch and their other notable recordings of works such as The Bach "Brandenburgs" and the Vivaldi "Gloria" are wonderful.This cd, though,contains very heavy and dull works that are just a little too ponderous for an enjoyable listen.After commencing with Beethoven's "Elegiac Song" to start us on our downward spiral,we next procced to Cherubini's "Requiem" and "Marche Funbre"....and then we die!!! Whoever put this particular collection of works together I doubt had in mind the total effect of death that would result...or maybe they did.The Cherubini works are not great music.As Requiems go...ehh.I can't recommend this cd unless you are studying these works and need to hear interpretation.Avoid the HYBRID-SACD recording especially.