“A Requiem for human contact, solidarity and the human voice that have all become dangerous and contagious” is Rufus Wainwright’s description of his ambitious requiem, which is dedicated to Verdi and Puccini. It was composed during the Covid lockdowns in 2020 when, like today, wildfires were raging in California, and first performed in Paris in June last year, with Mikko Franck conducting; the recording is taken from the premiere.
The threat of ecological catastrophe permeates the work just as intensely as the requiem’s traditional sense of human loss, for Wainwright interleaves his setting for solo soprano and chorus of the standard mass with Byron’s poem Darkness, which was written in 1816, after a volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies resulted in the so-called “year without a summer” across Europe and North America. The poem is delivered over quietly churning orchestral backdrops, but the combination of the two disparate sources never becomes contrived. And though the musical style throughout is essentially late romantic, with the possible exception of the Offertorium with its rather glutinous cello solo, it never descends into kitsch or seems obviously derivative. There are certainly moments that reveal Wainwright’s love for Verdi and occasional echoes of other composers, including Carl Orff, but the overall sense is of a language that Wainwright has developed for his own expressive purposes and which he has used with great fluency.
The performance under Franck certainly suggests that all concerned believe in the authenticity of the work, and the message it conveys. With Meryl Streep delivering Byron’s poem and Anna Prohaska as the soprano soloist soaring over the French Radio Chorus, there’s a real sense of a special occasion about it all, though whether the Dream Requiem finds its way into the mainstream choral repertory remains to be seen.
Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
