Review: Verdi’s Requiem/Teatro Regio Torino/Gianandrea Noseda - intensity meets poetry

One could fault composer Giuseppe Verdi’s churchgoing habits. “He’s certainly not much of a believer,” the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, his second wife and herself a devout Catholic, once claimed. But you could hardly say he lacked for convictions, even if they were more squarely rooted in this world than the next, as his Messa da Requiem – written in tribute to the Italian novelist and patriot Alessandro Manzoni — shows.

There’s a tidy symmetry in the fact that Verdi, a former church organist who incited much venom from the religious community when he turned to opera, similarly inflamed the secular musical world whenever he turned to religious texts. The conductor Hans von Bülow set the tone when he quipped that the Requiem was “Verdi’s latest opera”, a remark he later recanted.

Conductor Gianandrea Noseda’s strengths in leading the orchestra and chorus of the Teatro Regio Torino in a performance of the Requiem at the Hong Kong Arts Festival on Thursday were first, that he ignored such superficial divisions, and second, that he could negotiate their differences.

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Verdi read the text of the traditional funeral mass with the eye of a dramatist. After quickly dispensing some quiet, lyrical moments devoted to eternal rest, his score quickly focuses on the terror of Judgement Day.

But unlike Verdi’s operas, which unfold over hours (generally with sets, costumes and other visual enticements), the Requiem is a model of musical concision. A production such as Simon Boccanegra, which the Teatro Regio Torino presented earlier in the week, has moments when the conductor can step back and follow the singers. The Requiem offers no such room to manoeuvre.

After opening the “Kyrie” with shimmering choral sonorities that seemed to emerge slowly from the depths of Victoria Harbour, Noseda abruptly switched gears in the “Dies Irae” with tutti thunderclaps and a pounding bass drum that practically shook the Cultural Centre rafters. Although his initial tempo seemed overly brisk, an impulsive break from a quiet beginning, reprises of the Dies Irae theme throughout the piece showed the pacing afforded a calculated contrast.

The performance’s intensity may have been down to Noseda, but much of the poetry came from the quartet of soloists.