A performance of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem by a major orchestra always feels like a festive occasion. As the audience filled the main hall at De Doelen, home ground of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the air hummed with expectancy. One-and-a-half hours later, the audience euphorically celebrated the local orchestra and its principal conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Expectations had been more than fulfilled.
Dedicated to Italian literary titan Alessandro Manzoni, Verdi’s setting of the Catholic Mass for the Dead premièred in 1874 on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death. Applause was prohibited at the Church of Saint Mark in Milan, but the Requiem was an instant success. When Verdi conducted it at La Scala three days later, one reporter wrote that the audience went “insane” at the end of the performance and straitjackets were sent over from a psychiatric hospital as a security measure. Its stupendous music continues to galvanise audiences to this day.
The agnostic Verdi tosses the liturgical text onto a storm of doubt and indignation, but his Requiem is firmly rooted in the Catholic tradition. Searing visions of eternal damnation alternate with heartfelt, penitent imploration. Yannick Nézet-Séguin strongly underlined the two extremes, extracting gorgeous lyricism in the quieter passages from the orchestra and the outstanding Collegium Vocale Gent, and precise, warlike fury in the dramatic sections. The terrifying drum beats of the recurring Dies irae motif sounded like volleys of machine-gun fire, the basses in the chorus rumbled in with Tuba mirum like battle tanks. With deep contrast between ethereal beauty and relentless aggression Nézet-Séguin put his personal stamp on the work. The string tremolos rippled softly in the Hostias, and the Sanctus proffered a glimpse of heaven in the lustrous choral piani. Embodied by these moments of extreme beauty, hope was almost tangible, only for it to be blasted away during the next dramatic onslaught.
Conducting from memory, Nézet-Séguin stood a couple of feet away from the soloists, and was, as it were, a fifth soloist in the dramaturgical interpretation, mouthing the words with the singers. With graceful hands he shaped both vocal and instrumental phrasing, eloquently using rests and pauses to underline the searching nature of the text. He was in complete control of the orchestra, who responded with fluid melodic lines in the strings and winds and jabbing staccati, and of the chorus, who produced a warm sound and airtight legato across all registers.