Sydney Chamber Choir

Mozart Requiem Sunday March 16 2008, 6:00PM
City Recital Hall Angel Place

Mozart’s Requiem is music of pure gold – shining genius, radiant beauty, profound humanity. Richard Gill conducts Sydney Chamber Choir in a new completion of the Requiem by Australian composer Gordon Kerry: canticles featuring the exquisite delicacy of children’s voices are woven into the familiar fabric of Mozart’s masterpiece. An unforgettable concert experience.

This concert was supported by 2MBS-FM through its ‘Sparkling 102.5’ promotion in conjunction with selected performances at City Recital Hall.

Artists

Richard Gill – conductor
Penelope Mills – soprano
Sally-Anne Russell – alto
Christopher Saunders – tenor
Stephen Bennett – bass
Sydney Children’s Choir

Program

Victoria: Tenebrae Responsories
Mozart: Requiem, in the completion by Gordon Kerry

Review

Lively attempt to exhume and enhance Mozart’s Requiem
Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald, March 19th 2008

As the Mozart scholar Richard Maunder pointed out, Mozart’s incomplete last work has been a Requiem but no peace. Maunder’s is one of several attempts to improve on the the unsatisfactory completion by Franz Xaver Sussmayr, undertaken just after the composer’s death.

One of the most recent restorations has been by the Australian composer Gordon Kerry, who restricts himself to writing the bits Mozart didn’t write rather than correcting Sussmayr.

In the spirit of modern architectural approaches to heritage buildings, Kerry makes no attempt to conceal the stylistic gap between himself and Mozart through false pastiche. His sections – the Lacrimosa minus Mozart’s opening, the Sanctus, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei – sound like Kerry, while the rest sound like Mozart, clumsily orchestrated and filled out by Sussmayr. Kerry discreetly bridges the stylistic gap by interpolating four Requiem Tropes to texts by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella and Les Murray, for children’s voices and organ.

The first, Crabbe’s The Threat, contains nudging references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, creating a reflective pause before Mozart’s Dies Irae from the Sydney Chamber Choir. The writing for children’s voices is ornate and sensitive to the colour of the sound and was beautifully realised by the Sydney Children’s Choir.

Kerry’s ornate style interfered slightly with the simplicity of Les Murray’s A Dog’s Elegy. The moment in the Lacrimosa when Mozart peters out and Kerry takes up the story is effectively handled: one imagines a transition from an idealised past to a troubled present and the music gains a certain breadth through this shift.

Kerry’s best music came in the Sanctus, which ends with a gleaming texture enlivened by scurrying strings, and the Benedictus, which opens with premonitory funereal timpani strokes and viola, hinting at a Mahlerian farewell.

With an excellent quartet of soloists (Penelope Mills, Sally-Anne Russell, Christopher Saunders and Stephen Bennett), the Sydney Chamber Choir, under Richard Gill, sang with robust and resplendent sound, although such tone seemed less suited to the floating textures of the Tenebrae Responsories by Victoria in the first half.