REQUIEMS REVIVED: BRAHMS, VERDI, BERLIOZ

The text of the Latin Mass for the Dead has inspired composers since at least the 15th Century to give their dramatic all, painting scenes of hellfire and damnation, sending off the dead with fearful splendor.

The earliest of the Requiem settings to have any currency is Mozart’s fragmentary masterpiece, usually in the completion by Franz Suessmayr. It is that edition, but with the orchestration slenderized to sound more authentically Mozartean, that is employed in a handsome period-instrument version from France by conductor Jean-Claude Malgoire, the orchestra of La Grande Ecurie and the lusty Choeur Regional Nord-pas-de-Calais (Jean Bacquet, director).

Malgoire’s leadership is fleet and taut, peeling away two centuries of accrued sentimentality from the score. The solo quartet--soprano Collette Alliot-Lugaz, countertenor Dominique Visse, tenor Martyn Hill, baritone Gregory Reinhart--does its work with unassuming efficiency (CBS 422273, CD).

The first modern recording of Hector Berlioz’s lengthy and monumental Requiem enlisted the French Radio-Television Chorus (Rene Alix, director) and Paris Opera Orchestra under Hermann Scherchen’s direction. It was recorded in 1958 under the most difficult engineering circumstances in the vast church of Les Invalides in Paris, where the very first performances had taken place 120 years earlier. In the quarter-century it has been out of print, the recording has achieved a sort of legendary status, presumably among collectors who never listened to it.

Performers and engineers may have suffered greatly to get things to their liking during those early stereophonic days, but it is the composer’s score that, 30 years later, still bears the bruises in this raggedly executed, unsupportably lethargic and sonically dated (digital remastering doesn’t help) travesty. It’s on the Ades--grave accent on the e --label (14.085, two CDs).

A compact-disc reissue that justifies the classic status of the original recording is the Verdi Requiem taped in 1964 by Carlo Maria Giulini with the Philharmonia Chorus (Wilhelm Pitz, director) and Orchestra. The stunningly vivid digital remastering (Angel 47257, two CDs) should introduce a new generation of listeners to the power and lyricism of Giulini’s magnificently dramatic interpretation.

None of the soloists produces anything even faintly resembling an authentically Italianate sound. Yet each component of this starry quartet--Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, Nicolai Ghiaurov--sings with such passionate commitment that stylistic considerations are reduced to incidental trivia.

And there’s more. The Requiem is accompanied by a huge and glorious bonus: Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces for chorus, “Ave Maria,” “Stabat Mater,” “Laudi alla Vergine” and “Te Deum,” from the same conductor, chorus and orchestra.

Gabriel Faure determined that the departing dead (and their survivors) were more in need of solace than fear, so he omitted the scary bits--notably the “Dies irae”--from his setting. In the composer’s own words, his message was one of “happy deliverance, not mournful passing.”

Carlo Maria Giulini, in his brand-new recording (Deutsche Grammophon 419 243, LP or CD), presents a highly personalized view of this ethereal work. His pacing is very broad, his notion of choral and orchestral sonority uncommonly weighty. Yet it’s all hugely impressive in its somber fashion.

The Philharmonia Chorus (Horst Neumann, director) and Orchestra sing and play with transcendent beauty; the soprano of Kathleen Battle might be precisely the angelic voice Faure had in mind for “Pie jesu,” and the gentle baritone of Andreas Schmidt is touchingly apt in “Libera me, Domine.”

Brahms, in his “A German Requiem,” jettisoned the formal liturgy altogether in favor of appropriate death-related passages from the Old Testament, in the German vernacular. The result is a perfect musical expression of the Romantic era’s love affair with death.

Two new recordings are forthright, unsentimental and attractive renderings of music that (unlike the Requiems of Mozart or Verdi), falls quite flat in an unsympathetic interpretation. Wolfgang Sawallisch leads the Bavarian Radio Chorus (Joseph Schmidhuber, director) and Orchestra with a winning combination of vigor and sensitivity (Orfeo 039 101, CD), while Herbert Kegel leads with admirable restraint the Chorus (Joerg-Peter Weigele, director) and Orchestra of the Leipzig Radio (Capriccio 10095, CD).

Sawallisch’s flashy soloists, soprano Margaret Price and baritone Thomas Allen, make no attempt at hiding their operatic proclivities, while Kegel’s more modestly endowed pair, Mari Anne Haeggander and Siegfried Lorenz, accomplish their tasks with a simplicity matching the conductor’s low-key but by no means underpowered approach.

Otto Klemperer’s celebrated 1962 recording of Brahms’ Requiem with the Philharmonia Chorus (Reinhold Schmid, director) and Orchestra, Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is back (Angel 47238, CD). And to these ears no less drab in its sonically spruced-up reincarnation. Klemperer’s heavy-handed conducting, eliciting soupy string and choral textures and brass-heavy balances, is precisely what the score does not need.

Unlike Klemperer, who is merely dull, Willem Mengelberg, in a first commercial release of his (again) “legendary” live 1940 performance with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and Toonkunst Choir (Philips 416 213, CD), “interprets” Brahms’ Requiem. The Dutch conductor’s tempos are capricious-- flexible is the usual Mengelbergian adjective--causing some hair-raising examples of synchronization, or the lack thereof, between chorus and orchestra. Then, too, he has the Concertgebouw violins playing with an unctuous portamento that, alas, they execute with quite spectacular imprecision. The strong soprano soloist is Jo Vincent, the inept baritone Max Kloos.

The most interesting aspect of this dim-sounding, dim-witted release is, in fact, the program notes: Frank as only the Dutch can be about the unsavory wartime antics of one of their own, to the extent of recounting the number of times (four) Mengelberg rose to say “Heil Hitler!” during a Berlin dinner in Mengelberg’s honor in 1941.