The Maison symphonique which hosted Bernard Labadie, the Chapelle de Québec and the Violons du Roy for the Requiem of Mozart, Sunday, had not been so full for a very long time. This large audience welcomed with enthusiasm an interpretation of an exceptional result.
Sunday’s concert was born from silence: a minute of meditation for the victims of the war in Ukraine from which emerged the first notes of the funeral symphony by Joseph Martin Kraus.
By programming this funeral symphony before the Requiem of Mozart, Bernard Labadie makes the most refined choice possible. The work of Kraus (1756-1792), exact contemporary of Mozart, whom the history of music had lost sight of because he made his career at the court of Sweden, was revealed in the 1990s, in particular by recordings from the Cologne Concerto.
Requiem for a King
Almost all of Kraus’ production is interesting, but two symphonic works stand out: the Symphony in C sharp minor, VB 140and the Funeral Symphony, VB 148 (1792), singular and poignant sequence of four slow movements composed for the death of the king, friend and benefactor of Kraus, Gustav III, victim of an attack which is the subject of the plot of Verdi’s opera A masked ball.
By associating Kraus closely with the movement Sturm und Drang (Tempête et passions), Bernard Labadie campaigns for an exacerbation of contrasts, which manifests itself from the dryness of the timpani, then in the dynamics. The other possible perspective is to consider Kraus’ symphony as a veritable “Passion” without words.
Bernard Labadie approaches this symphony as an almost “ordinary” classical work driven by a “logical” pulse. We do not share this interpretative vision (even if it was perfectly realized) and think on the contrary that it is an “extra-ordinary” work whose pulsation is not dictated by a logic of the usual musical codes, but by the need to convey the idea of a procession by reflecting Kraus’ state of total daze in the face of the loss of his mentor.
There is in the funeral symphony of Kraus the permanent idea that an allegro should come but that it never comes, since there can be no joy in the face of so much pain. From this point of view, a kind of detached and very ceremonial restraint seems to us to be the tone to adopt.
A remarkable idea, however, with Bernard Labadie: the sequence attacked of the Meistermusik K. 477. The two works fit together perfectly, not only tonally but also stylistically.
Mozart recomposed
For the Requiem of Mozart, Bernard Labadie is, since its edition (1993), a defender of the score revised by Robert Levin. The movement started by Franz Beyer in the 1970s led to a reduction in the contribution of Franz Xaver Süssmayr. However, we must not forget that the latter “saved” the Requiem by finishing the orchestration of the Sequence and the Offertory and by composing the end of the Lacrimosa plus the complete Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus and Lux Aeterna.
Süssmayr’s questioning is very fashionable. It is done by forgetting somewhat all that he brought. The only thing Süssmayr did not do was use sketches of a fugal “Amen” representing 25 seconds of music. The very visible characteristic of Levin is to complete this fugue and place it at the end of the Lacrimosa.
What is less visible is Levin’s work on the orchestration, subtle, tasteful (the clarinet on “Huic ergo” in the Lacrimosa) and more intrusive than Beyer. What can be, on the other hand, discussed is the fact of also retouching the parts composed by Süssmayr (from the Sanctus to the Lux Aeterna), Levin arrogating to himself the right to use the inspiration of the latter to make a kind of “false-Mozart” according to its own criteria. This work includes some successes (end of the Agnus, development of the Hosanna) and some oddities (transition leading to the resumption of the Hosanna at the end of the Benedictus, then the Hosanna and Agnus sequence which no longer really works).
In practice, Levin’s intrusive side has opened a real Pandora’s box that has given rise to rantings such as the Dutron edition (2016), recorded by René Jacobs. Because even if he went very hard, Robert Levin remains a great “learned musicologist” of Mozart’s work and delivered a serious point of view based on an encyclopedic knowledge of the composer’s work.
Bernard Labadie had directed the Requiem just after his remission from cancer, in 2016. Obviously, the emotion was not the same on Sunday, but the interpretative level was of the same order with a total choir-orchestra alchemy. The highlight of this 2022 vintage is the light born from the perfect color of the sopranos desk (“voca me”, “salva me fons pietatis”). The reserve is a pronunciation always a little soft, especially in women (“Rex”, “lux” or “supplex” with “x”, “majestatis” with an “s”, “et” with a “t”) . But everything is so beautiful and accomplished elsewhere…
As for the soloists: faultless for Andrew Haji, with the perfect voice, and for Rihab Chaieb, warm, who has never done too much. Myriam Leblanc and Philippe Sly came across as excellent technicians, but their voices lack that warmth, that consoling dimension that one expects in a Requiem. Astonishment at Philippe Sly to note that with age, the voice does not seem to take on substance in the sense of a kind of roundness / breadth. But maybe with him the expectations are so high that we ask him the impossible.