This latest, scintillating, release from LSO Live finds Colin Davis conducting a big-boned, unashamedly Romantic and emotionally hard-hitting account of Mozart’s incomplete masterpiece, the Requiem.
The large-scale London Symphony Orchestra play rigorously and vigorously, the low strings vehement, the timpani and brass maintaining a strict rhythmic incisiveness even in the most grotesque passages of Davis’ fast, explicit reading. Listen to the biting string undulations of the Dies irae, punctuated by spitting percussion interjections.
However, it is not all loud and proud: moments of tenderness and lyricism continually emerge from beneath the forte splendour, Davis often deliberately holding back the tempo and dynamics until a point of stasis is neared, the Recordare in particular gaining a hymn-like nobility, textures magisterial, tempi slowly moving, allowing the drama to emerge from the entwining solo vocal lines; the orchestral seams are limpid and poignantly frail.
Davis can count on typically full-throated delivery from the London Symphony Chorus, who can sound marginally tentative in the quieter passages, but who take great vocal risks elsewhere, their collective tone often searingly powerful, occasionally lacking precision but nevertheless gripping throughout, the consonants spicy and the shuddering retractions to piano heartfelt.
Soprano Marie Arnet and mezzo Anna Stéphany make an attractive pairing of female vocal soloists, though the former can sound somewhat mannered. Bass Darren Jeffery can, as I have found before while watching him live, be fractionally underpowered, his pleasingly smooth voice having to push hard to register; Andrew Kennedy’s fearlessly deployed and juicily resonant tenor provides a greater pleasure. Both performers were Young Artists at the Royal Opera House, and both already have achieved great success in the concert hall and on video (notably in a recent DVD of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, released by Opus Arte).
This disc does not boast the finest vocal soloists to have graced Mozart’s Requiem, but Davis’ passionate, explosive conducting makes the release well worth the attention, though some typically audible grunting from the conductor can distract.
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