Duruflé : Requiem - Respighi : Concerto gregoriano

Album review

“With me, musical invention is the fruit of persevering and laborious work. I find it difficult to compose, and constantly return to what I have already committed to paper. I feel drawn primarily to the organ and the orchestra. These two worlds of sound, organ and orchestra, are so inexhaustible that – in my opinion at least – they offer all kinds of possibilities for renewal.” With these words, Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986) describes his work as a composer – work that was characterized by constant doubts and scruples. His statement also makes it clear why his entire oeuvre of sacred organ and vocal music amounts to only 14 works with opus numbers, all of them strongly influenced by Gregorian chant, Late Romanticism and French Impressionism. In his Requiem, Duruflé chose to adopt the spiritual, contemplative aesthetic familiar from Gabriel Fauré’s contribution to the genre. Fauré, too, had avoided placing the drama of the Last Judgment at the heart of the work and instead chosen the spiritual confrontation with death, paired with sentiments such as gentleness and hope. Duruflé thus turned his back on the romantic Requiems by composers such as Hector Berlioz or Giuseppe Verdi who, with their penchant for the grandiose and operatic, had painted a kind of “apocalyptic fresco“. Like Fauré before him, he also dispensed with any dramatic rendition of the “Dies irae“, instead placing the idea of the resurrection at the centre of his interpretation.

As with Duruflé, it is quite clear that Gregorian chant exerted a very powerful influence on the Respighi’s art; elements of it can be found in almost all the works he composed after 1920. The fact that these purist melodies, combined with the system of old church modes, fascinated him so much can to some extent be explained by the fact that they represented the greatest possible contrast to the overheated, chromatically refined harmonies of the Verists and post-Wagnerians. Escaping into atonality was never an option for Respighi; it was in the archaic, austere character of Gregorian chant that he recognized innovative potential. Respighi very happily integrated his newfound knowledge into a violin concerto, the Concerto Gregoriano, written 1921. To Respighi’s regret, the response to the world premiere was only lukewarm; indeed, he waited in vain throughout his life for a performance that would do the piece justice. Rest assured, this new interpretation by Henry Raudales is a welcome addition to the rather modest discography of the work.