Mozart Requiem and Bruckner Te Deum – Barenboim

There is a particular hush that falls over a room when the opening bars of Mozart’s Requiem begin — that low, murmuring D minor tread in the basset horns and bassoons, as if something ancient were clearing its throat before speaking. Barenboim understands this hush better than most conductors half his age did when they first attempted this score, and he understood it remarkably well even decades ago, when this release was made with an orchestra of modern instruments playing at chamber scale, no apologies offered for the absence of gut strings or period pitch.

I’ve owned this recording, lost it, bought it again on CD when the LP finally gave out. That kind of loyalty tells you something.

Barenboim’s approach is symphonic in the old sense — he thinks in paragraphs, not measures. The Introitus doesn’t so much begin as condense out of silence, gathering weight measure by measure until the Kyrie fugue erupts with a contrapuntal ferocity that still, on a fortieth hearing, raises the hair on your arms. The Dies Irae is genuinely frightening — not just loud, but urgent, the strings biting into their downbeats with an aggression that recalls Furtwängler more than it does any of Barenboim’s period-conscious contemporaries. Say what you like about anachronism. It works.

Not everything is equally successful. The “Quam olim Abrahae” fugue drags a bit, weighed down by a tempo that seems more concerned with grandeur than with the propulsive dance-rhythm Mozart surely intended — Süssmayr’s ending has been blamed for worse sins, but here the fault lies with the podium, not the completion. Yet the “Hostias” that precedes it is extraordinarily tender, hushed strings cradling the choir like something out of the slow movement of a late symphony, and it goes a long way toward redeeming what follows.

The vocal quartet is where this recording earns its place in the catalogue, alongside Karajan’s various attempts and Beecham’s idiosyncratic one. Sheila Armstrong sings with warmth rather than pure silver — hers is not the crystalline soprano of, say, Margaret Price, but there’s a maturity to the sound that suits the text’s gravity. Janet Baker brings that unmistakable ache to her line, a pleading quality she carried into everything from Berlioz to Elgar; you believe she means every word of “Recordare.” Nicolai Gedda, caught near the absolute peak of his powers, sings with the pinging, forward clarity that made him one of the most reliable tenors of his generation — no strain here, no covering. Only Fischer-Dieskau runs into trouble, the “Tuba Mirum“‘s low tessitura sitting awkwardly beneath his baritone’s natural center of gravity; you can hear him working for notes that Ramey or Ghiaurov would toss off. But even strained, his diction and his sense of the text’s terror carry the moment. The quartet passages — especially the “Recordare” — achieve an ensemble blend that still strikes me as close to ideal.

John Alldis’s choir sings with real bite, though the “Confutatis” wants a touch more ferocity in the men’s attack — the “confutatis maledictis” should snarl a little more than it does here. The English Chamber Orchestra, though, is superb throughout, playing with a muscularity that never curdles into heaviness. Barenboim draws out the neo-Baroque bones of the score — the stile antico counterpoint of the “Rex tremendae,” the terraced dynamics of the “Sanctus” — with real relish, and the 2008 remastering lets you hear inner voices (those alternating basset horns in the “Recordare”) that turn to mud in lesser transfers.

Is this a “period” rendition? No. Would Mozart recognize the string complement? Probably not. Does any of that matter, in the end? Not to me. This is Romantic-adjacent Mozart, unapologetically so, and it succeeds because Barenboim never mistakes scale for bombast. Against period-instrument versions — Gardiner’s taut, propulsive account, or Herreweghe’s more austere reading — this will sound old-fashioned to some ears. I’d call it humane instead. Four decades on, it still has the power to unsettle, console, and finally overwhelm. Not many recordings of this much-recorded work can make that claim honestly.