Schola C - Fauré: Requiem [CD]

Gabriel Faure (1845 - 1924)Requiem, Op. 48Louis Vierne (1870 - 1937)AndantinoDeodat de Severac (1872 - 1921)Tantum ergoGabriel Faure (1845 - 1924)Messe basseCantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11During the last thirty years many of our most treasured choral works havebeen deliberately defamiliarized. Bach's St Matthew Passion, Handel's Messiah,and Mozart's Requiem are celebrated examples of works whose present formand performance standard would have been unrecognizable to audiences threedecades ago. As the historical performance movement has crept inevitably towardsthe music of our own century, performers have begun to reinterpret the music ofthe nineteenth century in the light of current musicological thinking.Before John Rutter's edition of the early 19805 Faure's Requiem wasgenerally known as a concert piece for large choir and full orchestra. Theoriginal instrumentation was, however, quite different, in some performancesusing a choir of around thirty singers accompanied by four violas, four cellos,solo violin, and organ. The intimacy of the scoring was a deliberate reactionagainst Berlioz's Requiem which Faure detested because of its use ofmassed forces to emphasize the horror of purgatorial suffering. The firstperformance of the Requiem took place liturgically at the Madeleine in Paris in1888. There were at that stage only five movements; the Offertoire and Libera me(the two movements involving the Baritone soloist) were added later. In fact theLibera me had been completed as an independent work for voice and organ tenyears before; the Offertoire was the only movement to postdate the firstperformance of the Requiem. The performance presented here uses thework's original instrumentation whilst including all seven movements of thefinished Requiem. It is based upon the edition prepared by Denis Arnold in 1983for Schola Cantorum of Oxford which was subsequently performed at St Louis-des-Invalides in Paris in July 1984.Vierne was a generation younger than Faure, but like Faure had beenassistant to the charismatic organist Charles-Marie Widor at the church of StSulpice in Paris. Vierne was soon appointed organist of the great cathedral ofNotre Dame where he died at the organ console, as had been his wish, in 1937.The Andantino was purportedly written in a single evening as a sight-readingtest for students. Although the piece appears technically straightforward, thesubtlety and precision required of a good performance make it easy to judge anunintelligent rendition harshly. Such academicism was despised by de Severacwho forsook the traditionalism of the Paris Conservatoire within months of hisarrival there and transferred to the newly-formed Schola Cantorum. De Severacwas not attracted to musical life in Paris: he preferred the provincial life ofsouthern France. For this reason de Severac's music frequently possesses apastoral charm and Tantum ergo shows the composer at his most simple andtraditional. Like Faure and Vierne, de Severac's formidable ability