Columbus Indiana Philharmonic will distribute via email a recording of the originally scheduled March 6, performance on April 12, 2021.
Fauré’s Requiem is one of the most soothing and beautiful choral works ever written. Rather than focusing on the departed, Fauré’s masterpiece provides comfort for the living who are grieving their loss of the beloved one who has died. He does this with music of profound serenity that sets words of great comfort in a seven-movement composition. This video-recording for Philharmonic season ticket holders and single ticket purchasers, will be sung by a chamber choir drawn from the Philharmonic Chorus with instrumental accompaniment by members of the Philharmonic. The hauntingly beautiful work literally creates an other-worldly aura that offers solace and consolation.
The luminous soprano solo 4th movement, Pie Jesus, will be sung in this performance by the children of the Philharmonic’s CICC, which is directed by the legendary Ruth Dwyer. These children will also join the Philharmonic Chamber Chorus in the heavenly last movement (#7) of the work, “In Paradisum” (In Paradise). There are few movements in the entire choral literature that have a similarly simple beauty that touches one’s soul as does this music. Baritone, David Rugger, will sing the integrated baritone solos in several of the movement while also participating in the chamber chorus.
Definitely swimming against the current of his time (1880s), Faure wished to downplay the doom, despair, and fear that was typical of European religious funereal music. He considered much his own church’s established repertoire banal or inappropriate, explaining later of his Requiem, “Perhaps my instinct led me to stray from the established path after all those years accompanying funerals! I’d had them up to here. I wanted to do something different.” Fauré probably summarized his perspective best, in an interview from 1902: “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death; someone even called it a ‘lullaby of death.’ But that is how I see death, as a happy deliverance, an aspiration to happiness above, rather than a grievous passage.”
