At first hearing, pairing well-etched singing of the soft and radiant kind with searing orchestral music may be counterintuitive for a work like Verdi’s Requiem.
But this is exactly what the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra’s did in its performance of Verdi’s 1874 masterwork, at the Mondavi Center for the Arts Saturday evening.
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And the result was a Requiem whose musical pathos became self-evident with the subtle but undeniable elegance of a tiny strand of pearls.
Taking on this quasi-operatic work and making it play out over a big musical canvas has never been an issue for SCSO Musical Director Donald Kendrick. It was with this work that he made his Carnegie Hall debut as a chorister with the Boston Symphony Orchestra three decades ago, and it’s the same work that he and his SCSO took to that very hall for its debut in 2003.
Kendrick, who on Saturday conducted from memory, proved a savvy conjurer of the most fraught musical moments. These moments were revealed by way of the strong and clearly shaped music from this chorus. In the Sanctus and in the concluding sections of Libera Me, his choir gave shimmering, resplendent performances. The Latin text was never delivered with muddled diction, nor was the dark weight of the music underplayed.
The most noteworthy aspect of this performance was the amalgam of what the four soloists added, which was all about detail of the soft kind. The most emotionally potent of these, though restrained, was the performance given by soprano Karen Slack. The restraint seemed most noticeable in the Libera Me, with her singing skewing toward an almost whispered subtlety instead of operatic bombast.
Sweet Blend
Her voice was well-paired with the warm and light radiance of mezzo-soprano Julie Simson. The two offered a poignant duet in the Agnus Dei. Here Kendrick went for a soft, tasteful blending of voices rather than any sort of musical exclamations. It was an example of how music can be somber and musically delicious at the same time.
Tenor Bjorn Arvidsson offered a warm and well-shaped voice nicely suited to Verdi’s music. His tenor is not a gigantic one, but it is tonally fluid and honed well. In this performance, it came across as a highly sympathetic element. Bass Kevin Thompson, a last-minute replacement for ailing bass Clayton Brainerd, offered a dusky bass, though his voice seemed the odd man out in this arrangement of singers.
Unlike the clear, finely etched musical phrasing of the other three, though, Thompson’s grand and almost sepulchral voice was marked by moments of chunky unclarity, and the beginnings of his musical lines often lacked power.
Throughout, conductor Kendrick coaxed a strong performance from the orchestra, with woodwinds and brass playing with a noble urgency. Kendrick seized on all the dramatic elements in Verdi’s masterpiece. There were, however, rough patches where the sound balance was off between orchestra and soloists, namely in the latter music of the Dies Irae.
The SCSO’s approach to this masterful music, in which soloists eschewed larger-than-life singing, was greatly appealing. With so much fire and brimstone already a part of the equation, the juxtaposition was dramatically bracing.