The Voice of the Dead
My recent discovery of Teodor Currentzis leads me to an array of treasure. Among them includes none other than Mozart’s Requiem K.626. I listen to it every morning I wake up. I listen to it during lunch break. I listen to it before I sleep. Basically, I listen to this recording for at least 3 times a day. As the auditory sense heightens, one can’t help but be curious about the score behind. I also checked on Idagio how popular Currentzis’ rendition is for the public. To my surprise, it is ranked as 20th or something like that. Am I being an outsider again? I clicked the ranked first album. It is outrageously slow and uneventful. How could one stand to listen the whole work with an interpretation like that? Whereas Currentzis’ is full of emotional depth, inventiveness, and technical maturity.
Source: Amazon. (Btw, what a cover. Simplicity constitutes everything.)
Anyone who is familiar with the beginning of Mahler 6 would know the significance of good strings in a piece that we characterize as ferocious. If one listens to Currentzis’ Mahler 6, one would have access to the standard for good strings. Currentzis manifests the auditory impression of good strings in Mahler 6.
Ok, but what does Mahler 6 have anything to do with Mozart’s Requiem??
The connection here is the strings. I have been figuring out the secret for the unusualness of Currentzis’ conducting style. I mean, other than the studiousness, the painstaking effort to rehearse group by group, and the philosophical pursuit, what are the concrete measures that make the music sound the way Currentzis makes it sound?
It takes me a while to get a (partial) answer. It is the timber of the strings.
Currentzis started as a violinist. He might therefore have a particular vision for how the strings is supposed to sound like. A similarity in Currentzis’ execution of the strings — shared by his Rameau recording, the Mahler recording, the Schubert (Zender’s transcription) video, the Stravinsky (Printemps) recording, and the Purcell recording — is the role of the strings. Currentzis, apparrently, loves the strings, and aims for bringing out the quintessential quality of the strings. Once I was urged to listen to Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosis — played by 12 violins or something like that — the sort of high-register, soaring-shrieking-screaming, and high-romantic sound simply doesn’t interest me, but rather repels me. Currentzis’ standard for the strings in MusicAeterna is different. How different? You have to listen to it yourself. Linguistic vocabulary always looms so insignificant in the presence of music. We simply don’t have the right word to describe our reality. Music, on the other hand, has.
In Introitus, the strings need to align out the syncopation. From the very first note of the Requiem, the music commences on the upbeat, not the downbeat.
Still in Introitus, dotted rhythms are having dialogues with each other. The same rhythmic pattern massively duplicates in Rex tremendae.
At the end of Introitus, woodwinds initiate a dialogue with the strings, which the latter articulate in 16th-note staccato.
Kyrie (mm. 40) is a classic fuga. 16th notes evenly spans out in acute articulation. Any pianist who is into J. S. Bach will love them. I am sure that Currentzis, based on his articulation, loves them too.
Confutatis varies the 1 quaver+ 2 semiquaver pattern.
I remotely remember singing the soprano for Dies Irae in a summer camp at Eastman — that was the happiest summer in my youth; all I did every day is literally ESM: Eat, Sleep, Music. To be honest, I can imagine living without a lot of things. But I can’t imagine a life without music. I will skip Dies Irae.
How could anyone be untouched by Lacrimosa? Minor-2nd intervals followed by perfect-fourths and perfect fifths — don’t forget the harmonies here. Unresolved chords escalate tension and volume.
To be continued —