The authentic emotion of a Requiem by a contemporary composer who is already a classic

Among the many merits of Siena’s Chigiana is its commitment to combating that sort of premature ageing which often afflicts contemporary music. Every summer, the Accademia becomes a festival in its own right, dedicating a special focus to a great musician of the present or the recent past. This year it is the turn of Hans Werner Henze on the centenary of his birth, with 42 of his compositions featured throughout the two-month festival. And, of course, the festival opened last week with the Requiem from 1990–92 (followed the next evening by the intriguing “dramaturgical constellation” that Guido Barbieri has drawn from the Bachmann–Henze correspondence, one of the most intense of the twentieth century). Henze’s Requiem is a masterpiece – a term which, as is well known, is both ambiguous and even dangerous. Yet, frankly, one would be hard pressed to find another way to describe these nine ‘sacred concertos’ for solo piano, concertante trumpet and large chamber orchestra – almost an oxymoron – which together form a true requiem mass, yet without voices or words. Another paradox, for the man who was perhaps, alongside Britten, the greatest post-war opera composer: yet Henze himself theorised precisely the interchangeability between vocal and instrumental music, which, in his own authoritative judgement, "finds its most complete realisation" here. This ties in with another characteristic very much his own: one certainly admires the mastery of the composition, the refinement of the orchestration – in short, everything that makes Henze the most classical of the contemporaries (or perhaps the most contemporary of the classics). Yet these are never divorced from a genuine, authentic emotion, which was truly palpable the other evening at Sant’Agostino. It is always dangerous to confuse life and works; yet the impression is that the tragedy which gave rise to this composite Requiem – the death from AIDS in 1989, at the age of 46, of Michael Vyner, artistic director of the London Sinfonietta – was felt particularly deeply. It is an eclectic composition, completed in different stages, which nevertheless conveys a very strong sense of unity. The interplay of references – some obvious, others more subtle – almost evokes a postmodern sensibility: Mozart for the ‘Ave Verum’ (obviously), military marches for the ‘Rex tremendae’, the soundtracks of Riefenstahl’s films for the ‘Tuba mirum’, Berg and Bach for the ‘Lacrimosa’, trumpets scattered throughout the hall as in Gabrieli’s work at St Mark’s for the ‘Sanctus’, and I would add a reminiscence – rather than a direct reference – of Verdi for the ‘Dies irae’. But, in the end, everything comes full circle, everything falls into place, and everything dissolves into a genuine emotion.

In Siena, the performance was exemplary, the only issue being the less-than-ideal acoustics of what is, after all, still a church, which tends to ‘muddy’ the sound, all the more so as the piano is not positioned in front of the orchestra but in the middle. In any case, both Jeroen Berwaerts’ trumpet and Emanuele Arciuli’s piano were excellent, and perhaps the list of soloists should include the first violin of the Orchestra della Toscana, Giacomo Bianchi, for his various solos: both he and his colleagues performed superbly, under the precise baton of Kai Röhrig. Whilst outside the Chioggia ‘bubble’ the contrada members of L’Aquila were celebrating wildly after their victory in the Palio, one could not help but think that, in the vast sea of summer musical futility, there are not many festivals that have the courage to make unconventional choices, encourage new discoveries and take a chance on the audience’s ability to appreciate them: as indeed happened, with the church packed to the rafters, several members of the audience standing and long ovations for what is already shaping up to be the event of the summer.