L'armée Des Morts

Marking the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, this performance of the mighty Requiem or Grande Messe des Morts - took place in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in March 2019. Conducted by John Nelson, it involved over 300 musicians, including tenor Michael Spyres. As Nelson said: “Every measure resonates deeply with me and I feel there is sincerity, even in the great moments of bombast.” The Times wrote: “The surpassing virtue of this performance … was that both aspects, the spine-shakingly spectacular and the heart-rendingly haunting, were allowed to make their impact.

Paul McCreesh is one of the leading figures in the movement for historically informed performances, and he established his reputation primarily in Renaissance and Baroque music. Yet he is versatile and noted for his varied interests, and he has delved into the Romantic repertoire for this spectacular 2010 recording with Ensemble Wroclaw of Hector Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts.

With this surround-sound recording of Berlioz’s Requiem, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra tackle the infinite and the immeasurable.All the grandiose, striking beauty of the Requiem’s large-scale ceremonial is encapsulated by first-class vocal and orchestral forces, fully utilising the spatial possibilities of Grieghallen in Bergen. The matching of space and sonority was one of Berlioz’s lasting obsessions, one experience in St Paul’s Cathedral in London throwing Berlioz into a delirium of emotion from which he took days to recover. His Grande Messe des morts, notorious for its requirement of four brass bands in addition to a large orchestra and chorus, taken here from live concerts, has often been seen as one of the most emotionally powerful works of its kind. Setting a solemn and austere, even ascetic text, the music is not that of an orthodox believer but of a visionary, inspired by the dramatic implications of death and judgement.

Cet ouvrage vise à faire comprendre pourquoi, quel que soit le contexte religieux et idéologique, et même lorsque la croyance en l'âme est imprécise, le corps sans vie est considéré en tous lieux et à toutes époques comme important. Mobilisant poésie et peinture, architecture et médecine, statuaire et géographie, littérature et théologie, il révèle les manières dont les morts font la civilisation. …

A partir des témoignages de personnes confrontées au décès d'un proche, l'auteure s'interroge sur la nécessité de faire son deuil, expression galvaudée qui selon elle ne correspond pas à la relation entre les vivants et les morts. Elle montre que les individus en deuil ne cherchent pas la plupart du temps à se détacher de leurs morts mais les intègrent à leur vie quotidienne. …