Verdi: Messa Da Requiem

   in Choir & Organ (Jan, 2016)
Resurrected back to life by Brilliant Classics, this is a 1970s performance of Verdi’s Requiem. With an Italian conductor, two Italian male soloist, two female international soloists and the finely trained Leipzig Radio Chorus and Orchestra, you can be sure that what is produced is what Verdi would have wanted. He knew how to extract maximum drama out of a text and this performance pulls it off. Very operatic, the music veers from full-blown fortissimos to quiet introspection. The sotto voce singing of both soloists and chorus is excellent and the fugue from the final ‘Libera me’ has very good clarity. Although the overall sound does not match today’s advances in …