Mozart • Salieri: Requiems

Mozart • Salieri
Requiems
Valentina Nafornița (soprano), Ambroisine Bré (mezzo), Robin Tritschler (tenor), Andreas Wolf (bass-baritone); Le Concert Spirituel/Hervé Niquet
Chateau de Versailles CVS078   68:54 mins

It was, of course, all Salieri’s fault. If he hadn’t in the darker throes of senility claimed responsibility for Mozart’s death, we wouldn’t have had Pushkin’s play about his murderous musical envy (made by Rimsky-Korsakov into an opera), nor Peter Schaffer’s Amadeusto perpetuate the widely-held belief that Salieri poisoned Mozart. This is all grist to the mill in the extensive notes accompanying this recording which presents lucid performances of their respective Requiems, enabling us to reassess the arguably rather personal funeral music left behind by both composers.

Certainly the Salieri we get here, Classical, elegant, insisting on beauty of line, occasionally somewhat straightforward when it comes to setting but exploited beautifully by Le Concert Spirituel and the soloists, speaks of its very early- 19th-century milieu, and the hopes Salieri had for his own funeral. Courtly, circumspect, evocative, its Benedictus filled with beauty, it’s a foil to Mozart’s largely darker Requiem, unfinished on his death, with its completions and additions by Süssmayr and others.

Hervé Niquet takes things at a lick from the start, the Introitus light and zippy but atmospheric, the Dies Irae sculpted in perfectly pitched elegant rage. Also musically instructive, and a dramatic – if exclamation mark-ridden – are the booklet notes.

Sarah Urwin Jones