Belfry Messa

Le 21 août 1958, Karajan dirige à Salzbourg les Wiener Philharmoniker et un quatuor de solistes trié sur le volet dans la grand-messe verdienne. La bande de cette soirée mémorable était devenue quasi introuvable : Diapason vous la rend.

2018 also marks 250 years since Gioachino Rossini’s death in 1868. ‘Messa per Rossini’ was composed in his memory by Verdi and 12 other notable Italian composers Verdi himself composed the concluding Libera me, which he later used in his own ‘Messa da Requiem’. This rare recording represents the work’s triumphant return to the spiritual home of Verdi and Rossini: the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

The Verdi Messa da Requiem is probably the best known Requiem in the repertoire. Many great conductors have recorded it. I’m thinking of Toscanini at New York/1951, Victor De Sabata at Milan/1954 and probably the best known of all Carlo-Maria Giulini at London/1964-65. Some more recent versions have proved popular notably John Eliot Gardiner using period instruments in London/1992, Claudio Abbado at Berlin/2001 and also Nikolaus Harnoncourt at Vienna/2004.

Johann Simon Mayr’s music stands on the cusp between the Classical and Romantic eras. The expressive lyrical qualities in his religious music reflects a career in which he composed nearly 70 operas. The Messa solenne follows the Italian tradition of messa concertata and contains the full ordinary – a rarity for Mayr’s output in this genre. The work’s polyphonic sections made an especially lasting impression on churchgoers of the time, as witnessed by Mayr’s first biographer, Girolamo Calvi, who wrote enthusiastically about this work’s ‘exquisite vocal writing’ and ‘profoundly thrilling’ virtuosity – qualities that have remained hidden for nearly 200 years.

Verdi's Requiem–certainly one of his most moving, eloquent masterpieces–was written in honor of the great Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni, whom he admired enormously both for his writings and his political outlook. Though its text is the Latin liturgy, it has been called Verdi's greatest opera because of its basically dramatic character, as well as his own ambivalent attitude toward organized religion. Thus, interpretations tend to emphasize its secular or its sacred aspect, though, naturally, the soloists are trained in the Verdi opera tradition.

Celibidache developed a dislike of sound recording early in his career; his work was therefore represented mostly by live performance recordings, many of which were unauthorized.