There are pieces of music that don’t merely ask for your attention — they commandeer it, reorient your sense of physical space, make the room you’re sitting in feel suddenly provisional. Berlioz’s Grand Messe des morts is one of those pieces. It was written in 1837 for the Invalides, for an enormous nave and the dead of the July Revolution, and it has never entirely left that building. Every rendition since has been, in some sense, a negotiation with that original acoustic — with walls that aren’t there.
Colin Davis understood this. He understood it in 1969, when he recorded the work at Westminster Cathedral for Philips with the LSO in what became, for a generation of listeners, the definitive account. And he understood it still, four decades and a lifetime of Berlioz later, when he brought the work to St. Paul‘s Cathedral in June of 2012 for what we now know were among his final London concerts.
The recording that resulted — made live across two performances, with Neil Hutchinson engineering and James Mallinson producing — is Davis’s third documented traversal of the score. It is also his valediction to a composer he served longer and more devotedly than any other conductor of his era, perhaps of any era.
To write about this now, after Davis’s death, is to feel the weight of coincidence pressing on language. But sentiment is the enemy of honest criticism, and Davis deserves honest criticism far more than he deserves elegies.
So. How does it actually sound?
The first thing you notice — and this is partly the acoustic of St. Paul‘s, partly a deliberate expressive choice — is the quality of space between notes. The Requiem aeternam that opens the work arrives not as a statement but as an emergence, the choral sound materializing out of silence the way mist comes off water. The London Philharmonic Choir and London Symphony Chorus are blended with uncommon care here; you don’t hear two choirs, you hear one very large one, and the intonation in the sustained pianissimo passages is remarkably clean given the reverberant environment.
Davis in 1969 was leaner, more tightly wound. That Philips disc has a kind of muscular urgency — you can feel the young conductor’s excitement at having this colossal machine under his hands. The tempos are slightly faster overall, the textures more transparent, partly because the studio environment at Westminster (drier than St. Paul‘s, more controlled) allowed Philips’s engineers to capture inner voices that the 2012 recording sometimes lets recede into ambient bloom. That’s a genuine trade-off, not a clear victory for either version.
What the later recording has, unmistakably, is weight. Not slowness — Davis is never merely slow — but a gravitational pull that feels earned rather than imposed. The Lacrymosa, which in lesser hands can sprawl into something merely picturesque, accumulates here with the inevitability of a geological event. The famous passage where the four brass choirs enter from the corners of the building — north, south, east, west, Berlioz’s theatrical masterstroke — arrives not as spectacle but as judgment. The brass balance is exceptional; you can hear the spatial separation even on a domestic stereo system, which is exactly what the engineers needed to achieve and which they have.
Barry Banks, the tenor soloist, has one substantial moment: the Sanctus, that ethereal, slightly unearthly melody floating above a soft orchestral shimmer. Banks is a lyric tenor of considerable refinement, and he sings it with a purity of tone that suits the music’s almost disembodied character. Some tenors inflate this movement — treat it as an occasion for vocal display. Banks doesn’t. He sounds like a voice coming from somewhere else entirely.
The Tuba mirum, of course, is the movement everyone waits for, the moment when Berlioz deploys his sixteen timpani and the full brass forces in an apocalyptic unison that makes even hardened listeners sit up straighter. Davis doesn’t rush it. There’s a terrible patience in the buildup — and then the thing arrives, and the engineering proves equal to it. The dynamic range on this recording is extraordinary; the fortissimo here doesn’t distort, doesn’t compress into a wall of undifferentiated noise. You can still hear the architecture of the chord.
What I miss, comparing this to the 1969 Philips, is a certain rawness — something slightly dangerous in the rhythmic profile of the Dies irae, a quality of barely contained energy that the older Davis generated almost casually. The 2012 Davis has transcended that kind of energy. What he offers instead is something harder to describe and, I think, ultimately rarer: the sense that he knows exactly where this music is going, has always known, and is leading you there with absolute confidence and without hurry.
That is what a lifetime with Berlioz sounds like. And it is something no other maestro alive has given us.
