Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, and tomorrow night The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with their musical director Riccardo Muti at the helm, will be performing Verdi's Requiem Mass.
The concert hall has long been sold out, but the performance will be shown live via webcast and a stream will be shown publicly in Chicago at Millennium Park. This link lists the sites where the stream can be found in the U.S. and in Europe. PDF alert. http://cso.org/... Or go to CSO.org to find the list.
I'm a layman on the subject of classical music, and this diary is written from that point of view.
Riccardo Muti is one of the best known conductors in the world today, and is considered by many as the preeminent interpreter and conductor of Verdi's music. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Muti is an orchestra on the top of its game right now. This is a performance not to be missed.
The orchestra and Muti are celebrating the Verdi Bicentennial with performances of Macbeth and this one-time performance of Requiem. I was fortunate to be able to see Macbeth on Sunday. It was breathtaking. The soloists, chorus, orchestra and conductor were all phenomenal.
Muti is a talented conductor; my favorite aspect of his leadership is his ability to keep the orchestra at just the right energy level. He spent much of the first act of Macbeth holding the orchestra and singers in check. They were excited, they were keyed up, and he was able to keep them just at the threshold - not overdoing it, but staying at maximum desired intensity. He has impeccable time and communicates it flawlessly to the orchestra, and he is able to gently keep each section of musicians at the optimal volume and intensity. He even conducts backwards while necessary, shushing the audience with a backwards wave of the hand when they began applause before a piece was finished.
At one point in the performance of Macbeth the most astonishing thing happened during a prolonged musical section with no singing. I'm no expert on Macbeth, but from Spotify I believe this piece is called Ballo. (Not to be confused with the Verdi opera Un Ballo In Maschera.) Muti and the musicians turned this into ten minutes of bliss. About halfway through, Muti lowered his arms and quit conducting. As the orchestra carried on, he looked over to concert master Robert Chen (first chair, violin) and smiled. Chen smiled back and then Muti picked up the baton and resumed conducting. It seemed to me that he was thinking, this orchestra is perfect right now, at this minute, it doesn't even really need me.
Generally, Macbeth isn't even in my top three of Verdi compositions, but this performance made me tear up several times (and I'm no crier) and is in the top two of of any live classical perfromances I've ever seen. At the end I felt both worn out and energized at the same time, if that makes any sense.
Requiem, the piece being performed live tomorrow, is Verdi's composition in memory of his friend, the writer Alessandro Manzoni. Verdi was too grief-stricken to attend his funeral and instead composed this piece for performance at the one year anniversary of Manzoni's death. Several sources note how strange it must have been to have the debut of this soaring, magnificent composition in a church, where applause was forbidden.
This short write by Marin Alsop on NPR.org describes it musically much better than I can. http://www.npr.org/...
The progression of the piece tells the ultimate dramatic story, from profound loss in the subdued key of A minor at the start to sheer terror at what lies ahead on judgment day in the Dies Irae section. This is the dominant movement of the piece: It splits off in different directions, but always returns to the crushing hammer blows of the bass drum and orchestra blaring full tilt. Even though I know it's coming up, the return of the Dies Irae always takes my breath away. Terror indeed, with no escape.
As an opera composer, Verdi was always conscious of dramatic effect. He calls for four additional trumpets, stationed antiphonally in the hall, to evoke our archetypal images of the call into the next world. Those trumpet fanfares are a stroke of pure genius, and I long to conduct the piece one day with 20 trumpets situated throughout the concert hall.
Verdi's writing for the four vocal soloists is incredibly impressive: varied, challenging, virtuosic and personal, all at the same time. He wrote these solos for singers he knew — a soprano with a fabulous high C and a mezzo with gorgeous legato. This personal touch is something we feel inherently during these solos.
At the performance of Macbeth on Sunday, after all the encores, Riccardo Muti spoke about Verdi to the full auditorium. He said that Verdi wrote not from a lofty perch, but about all of our lives. our love, our hope, our dreams, our sadness. And Verdi does not judge. ("Unlike Beethoven," Muti said to snickers in from the audience, "Who was a moralist." I snickered too, but honestly I don't know enough about Beethoven to know what I was laughing about.)
Verdi was an agnostic or an atheist, or an "agnostic atheist" depending on the source. But he spoke directly to the faithful Italians of that time. As Riccardo Muti puts it, Italians pray differently. They don't so much beg as they do demand. They expect God to do his duty and come through, to answer their prayers. This is evident in Requiem.
At the time, female singers were not allowed to perform for church rituals, but Verdi composed Requiem with female parts in mind, and they were permitted to appear.
Even if you're not into classical music, I recommend giving this performance a chance tomorrow. Classical music cannot be owned by the elite, the 1%, or by musical snobs. It is and was always for the people. I'm more likely to be found in a dank rock club than I am a concert hall, but sometimes I find classical music more compelling, more daring, even more "punk rock" than modern popular music.
Here is an interesting four-minute "webisode" featuring Muti and the CSO from when they originally performed Requiem in 2009.