Verdi's Requiem in Austin:
The text at the fore, the music resounds
June 22, 2008Among all the great musical settings of the Requiem Mass, Giuseppe Verdi's has the keenest ear for the Latin text's dramatic chiaroscuro of dread and hope, guilt and repentance, struggle and peace.
Conductor Craig Hella Johnson kept the sense of the text at the center of an extraordinary performance of Verdi's Requiem in Austin's Long Center on June 21. Johnson's Conspirare Symphonic Choir was abetted by the Texas State University Choirs and the Victoria Bach Festival Chorus and Orchestra. The same forces closed the 2008 Victoria Bach Festival the night before in that historic Coastal Bend city.
Johnson's professional Conspirare "company of voices", the elite core of his chorus for the Requiem, is probably the best in the nation, and Johnson himself is en route to the legendary stature that Robert Shaw held in the late 20th century. Certainly few others could have welded such a vast and disparate chorus -- more than 170 voices -- into so unified and precise an ensemble.
I don't normally mention corporate benefactors, but South Texas Money Management Ltd. went well beyond the norm. In addition to sponsoring the Austin performance of the Verdi Requiem and its live broadcast on KMFA-FM, the company bought a block of tickets for the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio and provided the young musicians with a chartered bus and a box supper.
But the chorus didn't just sing superbly. It acted convincingly. Johnson made it truly a character in an opera. There were wonderful interpretive details in every choral passage, most memorably the choir's fearful sotto voce in the second stanza of the Dies Irae, perfectly setting up the magnificent brass fanfare of the Tuba Mirum.
Soprano soloist Kallen Esperian was slightly uneven on top but big and richly grained in the low register, which is particularly important in this work. She had a wide color range at her disposal, and she sang with deep personal urgency. Mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon was warm and comforting, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn magisterial and fluid. Tenor Karl Dent, who usually impresses with his limpid high register, was struggling vocally.
In the big picture, Johnson somewhat moderated the terrors and brightened the glimpses of Heaven. One might have wished for more pointed rhythms here and there, notably in the Recordare and in the Lacrimosa, which unfolded with too much equanimity. For the most part, however, Johnson's sense of balance served the music well, and his phrasing details were appropriately conceived and vividly rendered. The orchestra was not entirely trouble-free, but on the whole it sounded pretty good.
After an all-Beethoven concert by the Austin Symphony in May, my first hearing of the Long Center's 2,400-seat Dell Hall in concert configuration, I reported that the acoustics were strange, if not bizarre, but conjectured that my location in the middle of the orchestra level might have been acoustically disfavored. (There are reasons to think so, but I won't go into them here.)
For the Verdi Requiem, I was seated off-center in the mezzanine, under the balcony overhang, and found the acoustics there to be remarkably good for a multipurpose hall. Although the sound didn't have quite the luxurious resonance of the best concert halls, it did wrap nicely around my ears. The openings in the balcony above me seemed to work as intended, to allow some of the sound energy to seep through from above and mitigate the deadening effect of the overhang. Every section of the orchestra and chorus could be heard cleanly, in its proper location, in proper balance with the whole, and with its sonic character intact -- it was nice to hear the bite of the trombones and tuba in the Dies Irae. Pianissimo passages sounded gorgeous, and when all Hell broke loose the chorus and orchestra projected plenty of sound without sacrificing too much transparency and clarity. The best single-purpose concert halls might have enough sonic spaciousness to deliver the loudest passages more comfortably, but on the whole future occupants of Row G, Seat 114 in the left mezzanine should have no complaints.
Mike
Greenberg