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Church of St. John the Divine
July 11, 2010
A setting of the Latin requiem mass may not seem the most appropriate music for a glorious summer's evening, but then Maurice Durufle´'s Requiem is no ordinary requiem.
Which is not to suggest that the music is in any way inappropriate for the text - unlike, say, the crucifixion-as-comic-opera which is Rossini's Stabat Mater - rather that Duruflé's Requiem - which, like his countryman Fauré's, eschews setting the Dies Irae but includes text from the burial service - concentrates on consoling the bereaved rather than shocking them out of their grief with visions of hellfire and damnation (Verdi, anyone?).
But, unlike Fauré's anaemic, spineless work, Duruflé's Requiem undoubtedly has a backbone.
Although I believe I may once have heard the requiem on record many years ago (my school record library had a copy I seem to recall) Sunday's delicious concert was almost certainly the first time I had encountered the work in the flesh. And a finer introductory performance would be difficult to imagine.
Garth MacPhee, making a welcome return to Victoria, directed a wonderful, glowing account of the music, which exists in three versions, as far as the accompaniment is concerned: organ alone, string orchestra and full orchestra. Sunday's performance was (presumably) of the first, with a cello solo (the Emily Carr String Quartet's Alasdair Money) flown in from one of the other two.
The twenty-voice pickup choir - formed, I gather, from current and former St. John's choristers, as well as from vox humana - was excellent: the four sections, although unequal in number (seven sopranos, five altos, four each of tenors and basses), were beautifully balanced, with no individual voices standing out; intonation was very good, as was diction. And their pianissimo singing was simply gorgeous.
This is clearly music MacPhee cares about a great deal and he took a great deal of care over the performance; tempos were so finely judged that they all seemed "just right" and the music seemed to be over all too soon.
The organ accompaniment was sensitively played by St. John's current Director of Music, David Stratkauskas; Bob MacDonald coped manfully with a difficult baritone solo in the Offertorium.
Perhaps the most unusual section was the Pie Jesu (not actually a part of the requiem mass), in which MacPhee stood to one side as the ever-reliable Diana MacDonald sang accompanied by Stratkauskas with excellent solo interjections from Money (who was, incidentally, sitting roughly three feet from the watchful, yet doubtless paternal, eye of his father, a member of the tenors).
This section was also unusual in that, for me, it was the least sensitive setting, indeed seemed rather hectoring in tone (not, I hasten to add, MacDonald's fault): "Gentle Lord Jesu, grant them rest - or I'll know what to do about it".
That minor cavil aside this performance of Duruflé's Requiem was a delight from beginning to end.
Duruflé's music is heavily influenced by Gregorian chant; most of the Requiem's thematic material is derived from chant and the connexion was even more specific in the evening's opener, Quatre motets sur des themes gregoriens, each of which was prefaced by a solo voice singing the chant in question.
These four short, a capella pieces were lovely, their harmonies light and airy, and MacPhee directed them with flowing tempos and considerable sympathy.
From Bach onwards numerous composers have used letters from their names (or those of others) as the thematic basis for composition - even when a bit of a stretch is involved, such as Robert Schumann's ASCH/SCHA or Dmitri Shostakovich's signature DSCH, in which we must accept the 'S' as an E flat ('Es' in German musical terminology).
Rarely, though, has a composer used such a motivically unpromising name as that of Jehan Alain, the French composer who died at the age of twenty-nine; the name seems to offer but four letters-as-notes: E, A, A and A, a selection so plain that apparently only a Schubert could make music from it.
The Prelude et Fugue sur le nom d'Alain is a testament to Duruflé's skill as a composer. In MacPhee's capable hands - and, as this is organ music, feet - the busy prelude gradually grew in intensity from the soft registration of its opening to the almost strident close (with one of the stops, due to some freak of the church's acoustic, seeming to emanate from the other end of the building from the organ altogether); the fugue, while hardly Bach, also showed mastery from both composer and performer: Duruflé's in the way he used such apparently unpromising material, MacPhee's in the way he contoured and controlled the music.
Although I don't imagine that Duruflé will ever be a household name, this superlative concert must surely have raised his profile in Victoria considerably.
Kudos to all concerned.
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