I have a special relationship with the Verdi Requiem. I know, don't we all? But I nearly went to jail because of it.
The process of moving my belongings from Laos to Thailand more than a decade ago was interrupted by the Lao police's seizure of five of my parcels, mostly containing books and CDs. This is never a good turn of events. The American consul in Laos at the time, who had become a friend, said that the chances I'd go to jail over the contents �" which could include things the police had added to them: opium, say; a certain kind of photograph �" were 50-50. In Laos at the time, to be jailed was to be disappeared.
On our way to retrieve them, the consul's assistant, Hotsady, told me that topping the list of the itches the Lao authorities were scratching at the time were religious proselytizers. "Tell me there wasn't a Bible in there." There was, not because I'm a thumper but because it's a key resource for a classical-music critic. The breath-holding began. (My concomitant acute tonsillitis was almost a welcome distraction.)
Come showtime, the skinny policemen deputized a scrawnier six-year-old boy to fish an item out of one of the cartons as if at a raffle. His pinchers retrieved a Verdi Requiem, its cover emblazoned with Jesus hanging on the cross. Hotsady and I neither moved a muscle nor worked a lung. Then, in a caprice of the gods, the boy dropped it back into the carton disinterestedly and picked out another. Falstaff.
The authorities gave that a spin and were so horrified by what they heard that they tore it from the player and packed me on my way. Sir John to the rescue.
I tell the story to say that almost no music is "absolute"; and that some songs (as iTunes collectively calls them in ways I don't altogether mind) gather associations they never shake. That day at the roadside police station in the middle of nowhere Laos was the most afraid I've been in this lifetime. I can't hear Verdi's famous Dies Irae without its recalling my personal day of judgment narrowly missed.
It will be something if the Verdi Year produces a more important recording than Decca's new Requiem, with Daniel Barenboim leading the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro alla Scala (Decca), where the piece had its deuxieme. It's a thrilling, musically masterful performance of the definitive David Rosen edition of the score for Ricordi. But the best word to describe it is a troubled one: authentic. It's not just that these musicians are performing the work that most closely accords to Verdi's intentions; it's that they do it with full artistic and emotional integrity.
Maybe it's having spent months with recordings of The Rite of Spring dating from the premiere to the centenary. What becomes inescapable is the degree to which The Rite increasingly becomes a sound spectacular for a virtuoso orchestra. Sonically glamorous performances don't harm the piece in any essential way, but the spectacular can replace, or at least displace, the elemental nature of the work.
So with the Verdi Requiem. Heightened attention to its spectacular components �" and they are legion �" has, however ironically, brought the piece back to Hans von Buelow's crude but lingering critique of the piece (before he heard it; he quickly recanted): that it is an opera disguised as a mass for the dead. The words �" as always an obsession for Verdi �" are, with Barenboim, in the safest of hands.
The Dies Irae doesn't just blaze; it burns with the fires of hell, and greater than the gooseflesh produced by the orchestra and chorus in full cry is the lick of that flame. Recorded live a year ago at La Scala (where Barenboim is music director, and had the audacity to open the Verdi Year opera season with birthday concelebrant Wagner's Lohengrin), it is "live" in every sense.
The vocal soloists are the day's best, working in unalloyed ensemble. First out of the box with the Kyrie, Jonas Kaufmann inflects the music with the wealth of detail you expect of him yet without a hint of the fussiness a voice of his caliber would allow. The Ingemisco is glorious, but it's the hushed Hostias, and his quieter contributions to the ensemble (Quid sum miser) that really score. Elina Garanca is his match in the middle voices, singing the part in rich ribbons of supremely disciplined sound that yearns ever upward. Her Lacrimosa can hold its own with anyone's.
Anja Harteros and Rene Pape, already so impressive in their interpretation of the piece with Antonio Pappano, both outpace their earlier performances. Pape becomes ever the more subtle singer and is as impressive at pianissimo as singing full out. Harteros, who has become something of a regular partner of Kaufmann in both Verdi and Wagner, now sings with even greater power, range, security, beauty, and emotional impact. The long arcs of sound she unfurls mark a Verdian at full maturity, and she delivers the Libera Me as if everything prior has led up to it, as indeed it has.
But it's the wisdom of Barenboim's pacing and his unfailing sense of proportion in all things that ground this work in its fundamental humanity and make it profound. Decca is also releasing the Requiem in DVD and BluRay, and the video snippets available to the press underscore the deep humanity of this urgent, primal Verdi Requiem.