Cheap Cherubini: Requiem & Marche funèbre (Music) (Luigi Cherubini, Diego Fasolis) Price

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Customer Reviews of Cherubini: Requiem & Marche funèbre

Cherubini who, although Italian spent most of his adult life in France, introduced the Mozart Requiem to Paris in 1805, and obviously he knew that masterwork thoroughly. And although his style is not really very similar to Mozart's one can hear traces of the older work in such things as the Agnus dei.

One interesting, and odd, thing about Cherubini's Requiem is that, unlike most other Requiems, it calls for no soloists. And another stylistic matter: Cherubini is so eager to tell the story that he doesn't linger on endless repetitions of the familiar words. For instance, the Dies irae, which is not broken up into separate pieces as it is in other settings, goes like the wind. Mood painting is skillful, underlining the narrative.

I disagree with one thing in Taylor's review. He dismissed the Marche funèbre, but I found it quite stirring; obviously it is a ceremonial piece and has more than a little pomp, but that was the style of the time. Indeed, one can hear stylistic fingerprints that later show up in the works of composers like Berlioz and Meyebeer.

The performances, by Swiss Radio forces, are sterling.

Intensely moving
In 1816 Cherubini composed magnificent funeral music to commemorate the earlier communist regicide of Louis XVI and the end of the first world war instigated by Napoleon. It is appropriately slow and solemn, played and sung with heart by Swiss-Italian musical groups. It is an entirely choral and orchestral work, without soloists in the tender parts, perhaps as a way of universalizing the suffering and fervid hope expressed in the requiem text, as in the collective relief of an exhausted Europe and above all France of the time. The brass in the Dies Irae presage the swirling brass bands of Berlioz's stupendous Requiem composed a few decades later for still another war. The music, singing, performance, and resonant sound were all much better than I expected. The CD is simply an unbeatable bargain for those who would like to try this music.

While there is a slightly better conducted performance available, no one has surpassed the heartfelt devotion of the singing here. Played at a decent volume on good speakers, this is a dramatically dynamic work one might not expect from the by-then conservative Cherubini and other lesser lights of the late Classical world (a world already shredded by the Terror and Napoleon). If you read French as well as English or Spanish you are in luck, because you get two different sets of printed commentary on this rare piece. No explanation for the unusual presence of Chinese gongs in both pieces is given. I believe the orchestra plays on modern instruments.

Among the best CDs I've ever listened to.
I have difficulty expressing how stunned I was when I first listened to this brilliant recording of Luigi Cherubini's beautiful C minor Requiem. My pathetic vocabulary simply will not do it justice. Amazon.com's sound clips will give you some idea of the quality of Cherubini's work, but nothing will quite prepare you for its overwhelming beauty. The "Kyrie eleison" is so poignant, the "Dies irae" so fascinating, and the "Agnus Dei" so quietly captivating, that I caught myself gaping at the wall for a minute or two after listening to parts of the disc over and over again.

Luigi Cherubini is one of those once-great musical geniuses whose near disappearance from the contemporary repertoire I simply can't understand. Born in 1760, Cherubini came to Paris on the eve of the French Revolution and gained considerable success as a composer of instrumental and opera works. The great C minor Requiem recorded here, though, was written in 1815, after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In fact, the work was commissioned to commemorate the execution of Louis XVI and was first performed above his funeral crypt. Personally, I feel the Requiem expresses some of the fatigue of a country exhausted by twenty-five years of war and social upheaval, but I can't back that up with any of Cherubini's own words. It is certainly one of the few works of its time that strike me as being inspired by genuine religious emotion and unfeigned feeling. The piece has a generally "conservative" feel to it (for lack of a better word), which I think is a strength.

The only drawback to the disc is Cherubini's "Marche Funebre" of 1820. Let's just say, it's not very interesting. In all other respects, though, this disc is simply among the best CDs I've ever listened to.