Orchestra e Coro del Teatro alla Scala
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Daniel Barenboim
conductor
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Anja Harteros
soprano
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Elīna Garanča
mezzo-soprano
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Jonas Kaufmann
tenor
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René Pape
bass
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
“Messa da Requiem”
Giuseppe Verdi was at loggerheads with the Church. Whenever priests appear in his operas, they are decidedly unsympathetic figures, hostile and life-hating representatives of a rigid system just think of the blind Grand Inquisitor from “Don Carlo.” But does that mean Verdi was an unbeliever? His librettist Arrigo Boito recalled that Verdi had long ago lost the pure faith of childhood, “yet he missed it throughout his entire life perhaps more painfully than all of us.” A moving testimony to his religiosity is found in the Requiem, which Verdi composed as a memorial to the writer Alessandro Manzoni. Crashing thunder and wails of fear in the Dies irae set the scene for the horrors of the Last Judgment, making the sense of reassurance expressed in the Sanctus sound all the more exuberant. Yet doubt emerges at the end—along with the imploring cry “Libera me!” (“Free me!”). Daniel Barenboim, the Orchestra and Chorus of La Scala in Milan, and a first-rate quartet of soloists will celebrate this Mass of the Dead, which is much more than “an opera in ecclesiastical dress.”
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