The arrival of Roderick Cox gets a thumbs-up. It doesn’t get much better than all that.īefore Friday’s Aspen Chamber Orchestra concert, only one debuting guest conductor had sparked anything beyond, “Well, that was OK.” (For the record the exception was John Storgårds, chief conductor of the BBC Orchestra, back in mid July.) It finished with all the timpanists playing pianissimo. The final Agnus Dei, which recapitulates music from the Rex tremendae, Requiem and Hostias movements, reached a nicely controlled climax and subsided into softly restful “amen” cadences. The chorus’ Hosanna developed smoothly into a fugue in the orchestra, played with stately precision. Subtitled “choir of the souls in purgatory” with the chorus singing quietly on only two notes, the orchestra filled in the picture with a shimmering range of harmonic color in beautiful polyphony.Ī close second was the Sanctus, with tenor Zach Borichevsky making the solo line float so beautifully that the echoes from the women’s chorus, like a voice of heaven, felt totally justified. What affected me most were the a cappella Quaerens me, which follows the blasts of the Rex tremendae with introspective harmonies from voices alone.
Berlioz uses his huge forces quietly through much of the Requiem, often by unusual combinations of instruments or voices. These more intimate moments are the heart and soul of this big work. The eerie combination of trombones at the side of the audience with three flutes in the orchestra came off brilliantly.
#Marquee staffing full#
The full arsenal of brass and percussion delivered other thrilling moments, but even more impressive were quieter utterances, especially in the Hostias. It’s easy for this section to go awry, but the players pulled it off heroically. The massed choruses -Seraphic Fire, the Denver-Based Kantorei, and members of the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS - sounded glorious. Music director Robert Spano was up to the task, conducting with admirable clarity and soul. It also takes a conductor who can harness these outsized forces and shape the music into the fervently emotional (dare we say heavenly?) experience that Berlioz had in mind. And oh, by the way, a heroic tenor needs to caress the tender lines of the Sanctus from high above the audience. Berlioz calls for the brass to array in four groups around the edges of the performance space (originally the chapel at Les Invalides in Paris). It takes an expanded orchestra of more than 150 and even more singers in the chorus to mount this 90-minute-plus extravaganza. The Aspen Music Festival has delivered some splendid big-performance pieces for final concerts over the years, but it’s been a long time since anything made so completely magnificent an impact as Sunday’s Berlioz Requiem.
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