Requiem (Grande Messe des morts), for tenor, chorus & orchestra, H. 75 (Op. 5)
Colin Davis has always been among the more restrained and balanced of British conductors, even in High Romantic repertory, and perhaps even more so at the age of 85, when this live recording was made. If you favor the over-the-top kind of Berlioz reading, this live recording of the Requiem, made at London's St. Paul's Cathedral in 2012, may not fully do the job for you. Yet even those temperamentally not in Davis' corner should check this out, for among live recordings, and really among all the recordings of the Berlioz ...
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Colin Davis has always been among the more restrained and balanced of British conductors, even in High Romantic repertory, and perhaps even more so at the age of 85, when this live recording was made. If you favor the over-the-top kind of Berlioz reading, this live recording of the Requiem, made at London's St. Paul's Cathedral in 2012, may not fully do the job for you. Yet even those temperamentally not in Davis' corner should check this out, for among live recordings, and really among all the recordings of the Berlioz Requiem, comes unusually close to doing justice to the composer's spatial conception of the work. The work was written for the massive, squarish church of St. Louis des Invalides in Paris, and it features, at its ear-splitting climaxes, different groups of musicians scattered around the space and operating separately. Not only Davis but the London Symphony's engineers deserve praise for the results achieved on this release by the orchestra's own LSO Live label, for the Berlioz Requiem...
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