Cherubini Contrepoint

Cherubini's C minor Requiem, full of drama and austere beauty, is a masterpiece of 19th-century choral and church music. Although famous for his operas, Cherubini did not include vocal solos in the work (nor in the D minor Requiem for male chorus composed in his later years). The opening Kyrie is swathed in soft mystery, the Domine Jesu and the Offertory's final Amen have sturdy rhythmic underpinnings, and the Requiem's finale features a closing diminuendo as powerful as it is surprising. Cherubini opens the Dies Irae with a stupendous tam-tam crash, shocking to its first audiences and still packing a wallop, especially as captured by Telarc's engineers.

Luigi Cherubini's Chant sur la mort de Joseph Haydn was not, in the event, written after Haydn's death in 1809, but in response to a premature report of that event in 1804. The revival of Classical-period music has thus far given Cherubini short shrift, which is surprising in connection with the man whom Beethoven called the greatest living composer. Maybe this German release, by the veteran historical-instrument ensemble Cappella Coloniensis, will stimulate fresh activity. The chief attraction here is the seldom recorded tribute to Haydn. It's a wonderful work, with an unorthodox form that seems to bespeak strong feeling. Cherubini worked from an existing funeral text by Masonic author Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor, but the shape of the piece is his own. He opens with a slow, profound polyphonic introduction that not only must have appealed to Beethoven but perhaps even influenced the idiom of his late works.

Open-minded listeners looking for unfamiliar string quartets by a master composer of the same period as Beethoven and Schubert will likely be delighted by the six quartets of Luigi Cherubini. Written mostly between 1829 and 1837, the Italian-French composer's quartets are in the standard forms in the usual four movements. He fills those forms with entirely new content, which, if not as vigorously argued as Beethoven's nor as gloriously lyrical as Schubert's, is nevertheless elegantly expressive, consummately dramatic, and often utterly unexpected. Cherubini's quartets have received occasional recordings, but none have matched this set from Germany's Melos Quartet.

The first two of the three string quartets of Mendelssohn's Op. 44 were recorded by the Cherubini Quartett in 1990. With its transparent textures, elegant phrasing, and refined execution, the ensemble is temperamentally suited to this music, which seems to require those qualities above others. While Mendelssohn acquired many advanced compositional techniques from studying Beethoven's quartets, he never presumed to plumb the master's spiritual depths, and preferred instead to emulate the Classical gentility and poise of Haydn and Mozart. The String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 44/1, is predominantly exuberant and optimistic, and the Cherubini Quartett delivers it in a light, effervescent style, and only occasionally touches on the deeper passions that Mendelssohn prized in this work. More serious and fervid in expression, the String Quartet No. 4 in E minor, Op. 44/2, evokes the tense emotions of eighteenth century Sturm und Drang. The Cherubini Quartett renders the work with a darker coloration and richer tone, but these shadings neither interfere with the clarity of the parts nor weigh down Mendelssohn's fleet lines.

At the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1815, tributes to the executed Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were frequently offered, and two of the most important compositions used for their belated memorials were Luigi Cherubini's Requiem in C minor and Charles-Henri Plantade's Messe des morts in D minor. Cherubini's work was performed at a ceremony in 1816, shortly after the monarchs' remains had been moved to the royal crypt in St. Denis, while Plantade's score was revised and performed in 1823 for the thirtieth anniversary of Marie-Antoinette's death.

Cherubini is not known for keyboard music, and, indeed, wrote very little of it. The six sonatas for keyboard were composed while Cherubini was living in Milan in 1780, studying with Giuseppe Sarti, the Maestro di Cappella at Milan Cathedral. They were published in Florence three years later and remained his only keyboard music to go to press. The sonatas are therefore early works, very much in the ‘Classical’ style and all consist of only two movements and all are in major keys. While the sonatas …….

Peter Wells @ musicweb-international.com

Luigi Cherubini, buried next to Chopin in Paris, was universally hailed as a great composer during his own time; even Beethoven admired works like the Requiem in C minor of 1816. It's easy to understand Beethoven's reactions; in an age when lightness still ruled, Cherubini's mature works had great seriousness of purpose. The works on this release are a bit different. They date from the 1780s, before and just after Cherubini moved to Paris and scored his first success there with Démophoon.