Mozart: Grabmusik KV 42 - Requiem KV 626

On Thursday I was kindly invited by DD to the Bozar to attend a performance of the Mozart Requiem KV 626 by Anima Eterna Brugge and the Collegium Vocale Ghent, led by Jos van Immerseel.
The choir was was a mere 16 head strong and the orchestra’s 40-ish members were standing (but not the celli, of course). It took me some time to get used to the sight. But ostensibly the musicians weren’t bothered at all by this unusual practice. The Bozar hall was rather well filled and there hung a pleasing ambiente of attentiveness and awe over the audience.

Before the break the Grabmusik KV 42 was played, an Italianate, oratorio style composition that Mozart wrote at the tender age of 11. I don’t think I ever heard such a low Köchel numbered composition before, but it was against my expectations still rather interesting. I was particularly struck by the fresh voices of the American soprano Andrea-Lauren Brown and the German bass-baritone Thomas Bauer.

The Requiem was the obvious attraction of the evening. It’s a piece I used to listen to a lot in the early days of my musical explorations. The buzz surrounding the Amadeus movie and an excellent French-German TV series on Mozart I remember seeing certainly contributed to my attraction. In those days I also had a somewhat morbid fascination for that typically Viennese brand of death cult and necromancy. The mysterious circumstances in which the Requiem emerged fitted nicely with this. Apart from that it’s a masterpiece, of course, that hasn’t lost anything of its doom-laden freshness.

Despite the modest forces on stage, Van Immerseel presented us with a sternly monumental reading. Tempos were brisk, and the different movements crashed into one another as ice floes on an arctic sea. It was effectively Caspar David Friedrich’s glum painting of ‘Das Eismeer’ that constantly floated before my mind’s eye. It was all angular movement and tectonics, hardly any colour. No place for Biedermeier emotions here. But that doesn’t mean the music was devoid of life. It did breathe, in a clenched teeth sort of way. During the Dies Irae (‘quantus tremor est futurus’) I had to think how this piece was written at a time of momentous social change (the French Revolution) that in Europe would herald at least two centuries of almost uninterrupted carnage. Again Andrea-Lauren Brown provided some respite from the pervading rigour. This soprano comes with a lovely, lyrical but firm voice and a most endearing and poised stage presence. Also the other soloists proved their mettle. The Collegium Vocale, despite their modest forces, produced an piercingly powerful sound. As the piece progressed I was under the impression that van Immerseel was relaxing just a tad, allowing for a flourish and a splash of colour here and there. Or was he just spotlighting the stylistic differences of Süssmayer’s contribution? After the concert I briefly spoke with the maestro but he denied he wanted to put the different sources in relief. It couldn’t be done as there is no autograph to tell us where Mozart stopped and his colleague took over. The performance was met with a rapturous, grateful applause.