John Eliot Gardiner, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir - Giuseppe Verdi: Messa da Requiem, Quattro pezzi sacri (1995)
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 505 Mb | Total time: 119:52 | Scans included
Classical | Label: Philips | 442 142-2 | Recorded: 1992
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 505 Mb | Total time: 119:52 | Scans included
Classical | Label: Philips | 442 142-2 | Recorded: 1992
This religious masterpiece, composed in memory of the great Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), has themes even more cosmic than any in Verdi's other operas: life and death, heaven and hell, the Christian vision of humanity's redemption, the end of the world, and the last judgment. Verdi's music rises to the tremendous demands of this subject matter; it is music of grandeur, guilt, terror, and consolation, with a breadth of vision and an intensity of feeling unique in the composer's work and in religious music. John Eliot Gardiner's is the first recording made with period instruments, a kind of performance that some musiclovers still dismiss as dilettantism, more concerned with musicological correctness than feeling and communication.