Claus Peter Flor and Milan Symphony and Chorus in Verdi's Requiem, ADDA, Alicante

A performance of Verdi’s Requiem is more like a visit to an awe-inspiring monument than the experience of a piece of music. It’s a work that completely engages its audience from its very first hushed tones. In some ways, the experience feels like intimidation. This is a work that grabs a listener and demands to be heard, almost shackles its audience to its reality. Though the work is in many ways episodic, an intensity is maintained throughout. Thus, pinned to their seats by this barrage of sound and emotion, an audience hears every detail of this towering edifice. Perhaps it’s not an experience to be savoured weekly, but once heard, it will never, never be forgotten.

Personally it was decades since I last heard that his Requiem in concert before this performance by the Milan Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Claus Peter Flor in ADDA, Alicante. I will never forget the first performance I heard, which was a student performance in the main hall of the Royal College of Music in London in the early 1970s. It remains an experience that I can still vividly recall, so clearly does it live on in the memory.

The orchestral playing by Milan Symphony Orchestra under Claus Peter Flor on this occasion was perfect. One had the impression that this partnership might just have performed this piece before! And, though mentioned last, the four soloists also had a good night. Camela Reggio, Anna Bonitatibus, Valentino Buzza and Fabizzio Beggi seemed individually and collectively to delight in the concentration and completely silent way that the all the ADDA audience listened to the performance, prompting the soloists to seek out all possible operatic details in these truly operatic parts.

This was a memorable performance of an unforgettable monument of a work. The evening did end with something of a surprise which, I think, will be remembered vividly by many. After the usual curtain calls, the extended warm applause that has become the hallmark of this ADDA audience, there were many who had noted that, though the chorus master, Massimo Fiocci Malaspina, had taken a bow and duly acknowledged the achievement of his charges, Claus Peter Flor did not specifically ask the chorus to take its own individual bow.

So, after the conductor and soloists had said their goodbyes for the evening and the leader of the Milan Symphony had led the orchestra of stage, the chorus began to disperse. There were many in the ADDA audience who had noted the special contribution of the chorus to the evening’s success and it was at this point that they showed their appreciation. There followed a completely spontaneous and deeply felt round of applause specifically for the chorus who stopped leaving the stage took time to bow. They seemed to be very appreciative of the recognition. This performance of Verdi’s Requiem will live a long time in the memory for all kinds of reasons.

Orchestra La Scala Milan under Riccardo Chailly in Alicante's ADDA

 A program juxtaposing two first symphonies has to invite comparison. When those first symphonies are those of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, arguably at either end of the nineteenth century German Romantic tradition, then that comparison must include considerations of what happened to the style, if indeed it ever existed as an identifiable entity.

The orchestra, La Scala, Milan under its conductor Riccardo Chailly, has a tradition with Mahler symphonies, and this is very much the tradition of its conductor. Ricardo Chailly, the program noted, has over 150 recordings to his name and he also has recorded a complete Mahler symphony cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. ADDA’s audience thus expected a lot from the evening. There was no disappointment.

Beethoven’s First Symphony was premiered in 1800. Stylistically, it is rooted in the tradition that Haydn and Mozart had created in the previous century, but from its opening, Beethoven’s first is different. While we now label the earlier era as classical, Beethoven’s first surely heralded the era of Romanticism, where the expression of individual emotions rather than structural integrity was to be the focus of artistic intentions.

The structure is there from the previous classical era. Sonata form is evident in the first movement and elsewhere. The fast, slow, minuet and finale format is preserved, but the principal keys, which still dominate the work, arrive more by suggestion than by statement and the minuet is barely danceable because its character is that of the modern scherzo. The very word implies a musical joke, perhaps a piece of trivia included to express personal feelings and reflections.

This is thus a work that represents a revolution of symphonic thinking, but this revolution was not a break with the past, more its extension and amplification into new territory. And though Beethoven’s orchestra was large for its era, it still comprised only double winds and no trombones or tuba. What characterizes the music, however, as so often in Beethoven, is the possibility that the inspiration came from the composer’s memory of dance tunes and popular music, reworked and remodelled into “serious” form.

And so to the link. At the end of that nineteenth century, Gustav Mahler announced another stylistic revolution with his first symphony, whose most noticeable difference from the Beethoven was immediately the size of the orchestra employed. There are four movements again. But now the movements pay only lip service to the formal structures of sonata form, which, like Beethoven’s introduction of the tonic, is via suggestion rather than statement. The placing of the slow movement third rather than second began with Beethoven, so this was nothing new.

But what Mahler did that was revolutionary was to incorporate folk-like melodies into the symphonic argument and render that argument largely textural. Here, the composer seems to want to explore the range of sonorities that these large forces could generate. But despite the composer’s reputation for deploying large forces, these sonorities are only rarely loud or brash. These contrasts are textural and coloristic, clearly intended to convey to the listener the quality of an experience, rather than its narrative.

A contemporary listener can only imagine what an audience in central Europe made of a slow movement that juxtaposed a funeral march based on a French children’s song with passages that derived from Jewish Klezmer dance music.

Perhaps the finale is a little too meandering and perhaps its triumphal end is overblown. But who cares? And this performance, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Chailly, was wonderfully detailed. Here we heard all the sonorities and all the dynamic changes in intricate and vivid detail. Everything seemed to make sense, even those passages where the composer seemed to delight in the tangential. The use of rubato was obvious, but never overdone. Everything made musical sense to the extent that during the first movement this listener heard the progress as a walk through scenic countryside! It is a work I have heard many times before but with Riccardo Chailly’s vision and supremely masterful reading, I now can’t wait for the next performance.

And what about the comparison, Beethoven to Mahler, mentioned at the start? Beethoven arguably invented the individual’s experiential centrality in the symphony. No longer was the form a rigid frame that had to contain certain elements. In his first symphony, Beethoven had not yet fully divested himself of the need to conform, but the innovations he introduced were well developed in Mahler’s time. By the end of that nineteenth century, the individual’s emotions and feelings had become the point of the exercise, not mere suggestion and in Mahler’s first, we meet the composer, not the structure. In fact, the whim of the composer’s intention was about to prompt others, following the current extension of harmonic complexity, to call again for the imposition of structure. There was a tradition, but perhaps by the century’s end, there was nowhere else for the style to go. And, if we were to accept popular tunes into the symphony, why not make folk culture central to the argument? A new era dawned.