1.
3.
Stan Sholik
Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Courtesy of the Seattle Symphony
2.
Scott Kimmins
4.
The wide-ranging Music Alive program embeds contemporary composers with orchestras—and in their communities. The program not only supports the creation of new works, it helps forge new connections among composers, orchestras, and audiences. 36
T
In
he “Lacrymosa” from Mozart’s Requiem worked its spell as it has for two centuries. The Albany Symphony Orchestra’s violins led the way with their sighing two-note phrases. The Pro Musica Chorus intoned Mozart’s mournfully seductive setting of the Latin lament. When the choir paused, the orchestra’s woodwinds added their consoling warmth. But as the chorus’s “Amen” concluded, the strings kept going. Roaming beyond the path laid out by Mozart and Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who completed the Requiem after Mozart’s death, those two-note phrases ranged wider and gained intensity. As they continued, an ethereal theme reminiscent of the “Lacrymosa” appeared high in the strings, and it grew into a spacious orchestral fugue. The woodwinds echoed their lyrical turn from the “Lacrymosa”; outcries from the brasses pushed the music toward peaks. With the singers remaining silent, the five-minute meditation harked back to the orchestral elegy that climaxes the last act of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. The “Lacrymosa” and its instrumental apotheosis belong to Requiem Reimagined, a 70-minute transformation of Mozart by the six-composer collective Sleeping Giant. Premiered last spring, the group’s mixture of old and new is the headline event of a three-year symphony
WINTER 2016