The Buffalo Philharmonic Left It All Onstage To Close Out the Season
Kleinhans Is Still Shaking From Sunday's Performance
If Eine Kleine Nachtmusic is music for a night out with Chardonnay and a few friends, Verdi’s Requiem is giving your keys to the bartender and lining up shots of tequila. Put the kids to bed and saddle up, because we’re doing this.
Verdi’s Requiem fills the stage with an orchestra, a full choir, four soloists, and immediately raises the musical intensity to the redline. Turn up your speakers.
The drama barely wavers for the next 90 minutes.
Requiem is Verdi’s Lament to Italy’s Suffering and Dispossessed People
Requiem (1874) is a funeral mass never intended to be performed in church. It is wholly a secular work, filled with latent meaning to the people of a fractured Italian peninsula, broken by the Napoleonic Wars and brutally occupied by hostile armies since 1796.
Verdi was a nationalist at the beginning of Italy’s unification (Risorgimento). The drama he poured into his Requiem officially honored Alessandro Manzoni, a key figure in promoting the unification of the peninsula under a vision of ancient Roman values. Unofficially, the Requiem gave a powerful voice to calls for Italian self-government. I quote the BBC:
When Italians sang the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves at Verdi’s funeral procession, it wasn’t just because it was a catchy tune they knew the words to. Its subject – the Israelites giving poignant voice to their longing for the promised land – had become a powerful analogue for the long-frustrated desires of the Italian people.
When they cried “Viva Verdi!” during the funeral procession, they were still acutely conscious of the slogan’s double meaning and its clandestine resonance for the agitators of ‘the Risorgimento’, as the cause of Italian nationalism was known. The letters VERDI also spelled out the name of the King of Sardinia who, in 1861, finally took the throne of a unified nation for the first time since the 6th Century – Victor Emmanuele Re D’Italia.
The BPO Pulled It Off Spectacularly
Deciding sometime during the grim days of COVID to end the 2022-2023 season with Requiem was optimistic, to say the least. It meant that the BPO was confident it would have the physical and emotional resources to perform a complex, world-renowned masterpiece requiring 100 high-level musical professionals.
The Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra Chorus, and the SUNY Fredonia Chorus gave a thrilling, note-perfect performance under Maestro JoAnnFaletta’s baton. Soloists Laquita Mitchell, Tamara Gura, Charles Reid, and Darren Stokes were brilliant in solo and tandem, each fearless in a bright spotlight.
The funeral mass was accompanied by supertitles for those of us whose Latin was less than perfect. The chorus and orchestra demonstrated an intelligent interplay, complementing but not overshadowing each other. The musicians managed to stay grounded and focused within the rippling, towering waves of sound.
As Kleinhans Music Hall shook under the thundering applause, I took a moment to be grateful. At the close of this musical season, our world is no less broken than the one Verdi lamented; but in that place, in that time, our little corner of humanity rose to the occasion.
