Like the work of it’s dedicatee, Detlev Glanert's Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch spans the mortal and the immortal, the demonic and the angelic, the putrid and the sublime. It is one of the events commemorating the 500th anniversary of the painter's death, and premiered one day before this Amsterdam performance, at St John's Cathedral in 's-Hertogenbosch, Bosch’s birthplace. It was an extraordinary performance, and not just because of the extraordinary musicianship of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, who co-commissioned the event, and the phenomenal Netherlands Radio Choir.
It all started with demons. When selecting his texts, Glanert was inspired by Boschian devils of all gradations, from mischievous imps to merciless torturers. In the Middle Ages devils were very real, and constantly out to get your immortal soul. Adopting this medieval view of the universe, Glanert framed his Requiem as a divine trial. At the end of his life, Bosch is spiritually examined by the archangel Michael, who uses the seven deadly sins as a checklist. In a masterly stroke that gives the work both meaty content and a robust structure, the composer alternates sections of the Catholic mass for the dead with poems in secular Latin from the medieval collection Carmina Burana. The texts describing the deadly sins were introduced by an accusatory Speaker, baritone David Wilson-Johnson, intoning the name of the relevant devil specialising in that particular sin – Lucifer for pride, for example, or Leviathan for envy.
The work opens with a section called De Demonibus (On Devils), in which soloists and choir both invoke and exorcise the legions of hell in sung speech. Another apt decision, since Bosch was a lay brother of a religious confraternity, and, like some of its members, might have held the title, if not the mandate, of "exorcist”. Repetitive short figures in the orchestra, liberal use of that fiendish technique, the pizzicato, and crashing chords immediately plunged us into a world of cumulative vice and looming damnation. Then, like a soft halo, the small “Fernchor”, a “distant” choir positioned on the balcony, floated a subdued Requiem aeternam in four-part harmony. The main choir picked up this doubtful prayer, and the combined choral forces ended on a dissonant chord. Next, the first deadly sin, gluttony, reared its insatiable head as the bass solo sang the pleasures of binging on food and drink in Gula. The drooling woodwinds and flatulent horns in the accompaniment were just one example of Glanert’s richly descriptive writing. The supplicant ensemble in the deeply polyphonous Absolve Domine then gave way to the tenor’s convulsive Ira (Wrath).