It is now nearly ten
years since this recording came out.
The present writer was living in Utrecht
at the time it was recorded and issued
and well remembers the flurry of associated
Biber activity that seemed to overwhelm
the concert life of the city at that
time. This was the first recording of
the fifteen-voice Requiem. It was a
remarkable achievement, undertaken with
Gustav Leonhardt’s usual authoritative
stamp.
The Requiem was most
likely composed for the funeral of the
man who was probably the greatest ruler
Salzburg ever had, Prince-Archbishop
Maximilian Gandolph, Biber’s patron
and a great promoter of the arts in
general. He had died suddenly on 3 May
1687. He lay in state for six days,
before being carried in procession to
his cathedral where this solemn Requiem
was performed, having been composed
and rehearsed in the intervening six
days. Biber must be considered the major
musical figure between Monteverdi and
Bach and the more of his sacred works
that become available on recordings
the more this view will be confirmed.
The Requiem à 15 may have been
composed quickly, but it shows no signs
of haste or roughness. It is unusual
in several ways, not least the key of
A major (Biber’s other later Requiem
is in the more sombre key of F minor)
and the inclusion of two festive trumpets
and timpani. While Biber considers aspects
of death at various times in this work
the overall feeling is not one of sombre
mourning but, possibly befitting a great
and genuinely much-loved ruler, of calm
grandeur and the confident assurance
of victory and heavenly glory.
In this recording it
is in the vigorous passages that Leonhardt’s
controlled grandeur of expression is
shown at its best. The opening rhythmic
passages of the Offertorium, with bass
duet and trumpets show this drive well.
The bass soloists are of as fine a quality
as the soprano and tenor pairings and
the trumpet playing of Po Lindeke and
Hans-Martin Kothe has a marvellous bite
and pungency without overbalancing against
the singers. In the choral sections
one occasionally gets the feeling that
the choir of the Nederlandse Bachvereniging
is a little too large for the complex
textures; although Biber’s orchestral
forces are forward-looking in their
distribution, the vocal writing is still
heavily indebted to the Venetian model
of multiple ensemble textures rather
than a single body of "choir".
It is in this aspect, with three or
four voices per part, that there occurs
some rather thick sounding singing.
This is noticeable for example in the
Hosanna section of the Sanctus where
the choir’s rapid repetitions of ‘in
excelsis’ lack the same sense of
upward growth that the soloists bring
to the same section in dialogue. There
is another version of this Requiem available
on CD now – that by La Capella Reial
de Catalunya under Jordi Savall – reviewed
elsewhere on this site. The Savall recording
has some advantages in the greater overall
sense of polish in the ensemble performances.
Furthermore it is recorded in Salzburg
Cathedral itself. However this is not
to denigrate the sound quality of the
Leonhardt recording. The acoustic of
the Utrechtse Pieterskerk is spacious
and warm – amply suited to the music
and, while the grouping of performers
in the smaller Pieterskerk space does
not give the same special sense of Savall’s
recording there is a clarity of sound
– even in the thickest textures – that
the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi engineers
have captured magnificently. Choosing
between these two performances is not
easy, especially given the almost magisterial
authority of both Savall and Leonhardt.
The couplings may help. Whereas the
Savall recording pairs the Requiem with
the well-known Biber Battalia and comes
in at a somewhat less than generous
47 minute total, this Leonhardt disc
pairs the Biber with a real rarity well
worth discovering.
The slightly later
Stabat Mater by Agostino Steffani is
cast in a more traditional ‘baroque’
sound-world. Steffani has only recently
come to any sort of prominence as a
composer, and then largely for his secular
music. Like many of the multi-talented
artists of the 17th and 18th
centuries Steffani was a part-time composer
– having been ordained priest in 1680
he pursued a career in administration
and diplomacy, becoming a titular Bishop
in 1707, president of the local council
of Düsseldorf and both Rector and
Chancellor of Heidelberg University.
In between he found time to write music
of a distinctively original bent, employing
in the Stabat Mater a range of techniques
from consciously archaic stilus ecclesiasticus
through to extremely rhetorical and
affecting writing making use of some
remarkably low bass writing. This is
performed with suitably operatic gravitas
by Harry van der Kamp, to whom these
subterranean passages appear to present
no challenge.
It would probably have
to be said that Jordi Savall’s 2003
Astrée disc of the Biber Requiem
has the edge over the older Leonhardt
in terms of perfection of performance.
Savall’s ensembles are more virtuosic
than Leonhardt’s, but the DHM disc does
have the advantage in offering two substantial
works of equal interest, rather than
one, with a short coupling. The twelve
movements of the Steffani Stabat Mater
are imbued with piquant subtleties and
endless invention of textural, harmonic
and melodic ideas. Authoritative performances
of both works, with particularly good
soloists mean that there is nothing
to be lost from this ten-year-old recording.
Peter Wells
Marta Almajano, Mieke van der Sluis – sopranos