Atheist’s Requiem

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I just sat through two hours of hellfire and brimstone through music… and loved it.

Giuseppe Verdi, Atheist and renowned opera composer, wrote his Requiem in 1874 following the death of his long-time friend, poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni.  It is taken from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead.  On its completion, it was criticised for being too theatrical (Verdi wrote mostly operas) and irreverent.

I have heard Verdi’s Requiem many times, although this was the first live performance I attended, and I have a strong feeling that the irreverence is intentional.  This is supported by at least one of his many biographers.

Verdi focused on the “Dies Irae” section of the Mass and centred his entire Requiem around it.  “Dies Irae”  is a poem from the thirteenth century that is often struck from the Requiem Mass due to its intense imagery of damnation and Judgement Day, something the Catholic church now likes to under-emphasise for P.R. reasons or something of the like.  Verdi used and emphasised the movement to lambaste the doctrine of Hell that was touted out by the church to strike fear into its followers and keep them in check.  Verdi’s “Dies Irae” movement is terrifying and chilling with trumpets surrounding the performance hall and large bass drums framing the stage.  It can only be described as powerful and discomforting… and any time you can make believers feel uncomfortable listening to Christian doctrine is time well spent.

Of all the requiems I have heard, I most thoroughly enjoy Verdi’s Requiem and its intense musical stylisations.

Now I’d like to critique this individual performance, so humour me while I don my fag-hat.

Tonight’s performance by the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and Chorus was exceedingly impressive.  The chorus was intense and very well disciplined.  With over two hundred voices, I was amazed at how crisp and controlled the pianissimos were in the opening “Requiem and Kyrie.”  The talk-sung lines of the “Dies Irae” were also very well controlled and exceptionally creepy.  I had chills running up and down my spine for the entire first hour of the Requiem, and not just because of the nauseatingly powerful perfume-marinades of the octogenarians I was crudely sandwiched between.

John Hugo, the Chorus Master, must have prepared the gigantic chorus with rigorous training involving bullwhips and cattle prods.  Nothing else–well, almost nothing else–could account for such vocal precision.  The chorus consisted of the Roanoke Symphony Chorus, the Jefferson Choral Society, the Radford University Choral Union and the Liberty University Concert Choir and Chamber Singers.  I loved the irony of Jerry Falwell’s students participating in the performance of such a famous musical attack on the church.  If I recall correctly, they also participated in the chorus during the equally blasphemous–and equally impressive–Carmina Burana last year.

The orchestra, led by the inimitable conductor, Maestro David Wiley, was fantastic and covered their few mistakes well.  Maestro Wiley, as always, was as much fun to watch as his orchestra was to listen to.  With ninja-like moves (You would understand exactly how accurate this description is if you have ever attended one of his performances.) he was able to keep the entire orchestra and the massive chorus under his complete control.  The fiery Maestro is notorious for running out of limbs while directing his orchestra and bringing in an entire chorus by raising an eyebrow.  He was even able to hush the audience from jumping into spontaneous applause between movements with just an outstretched finger.  The 293 musicians on stage and the potential 2,240 audience members responded to every twitch of the Maestro’s muscular system.

Unfortunately, the four soloists were not at the same level as the rest of the performance.  The mezzo-soprano, Eugenie Grunewald, and the bass, Robert Honeysucker (yes… Honeysucker), were very good, so they are immune from my critical wrath tonight.  The tenor, Drew Slatton, left a little to be desired, but his arm was in a sling, so he has a sympathy vote from me and I’ll let him slide this time.  The soprano, Carter Scott, is a talentless, vain bitch.  There… I said it.  Allow me to cover her vanity before I lambaste her painfully obvious lack of talent.  Remember:  my fag-hat is on and I’m about to bust a cap in this sista.

The first thing I noticed, before she even opened her fire-engine-red mouth, was that she thought she was better than every other human being in the concert hall.  She was wearing a blue sequined dress with a sheer white shawl over her shoulders.   For those of you who don’t regularly attend concerts, when there are almost three hundred people on stage and they’re all wearing black, white and gray, you do not wear blue.  It would behove you more to be naked on stage than to be wearing a coloured, sequined dress among a sea of black and white.

Halfway through the second hour of the concert, she decided to remove her shawl to reveal her pasty, pointy shoulders.  This is completely inappropriate in a classical concert, not to mention that the straps on her dress would be most fitting at a middle school homecoming dance.  Her whole ensemble looked like a pageant dress… a pageant dress from a Miss Southeast Missouri competition held in a high school gymnasium.   To complete the picture, she was slathered in prostitute-red lipstick which I must assume she applied with a paint roller as if she were painting the side of a barn.

The picture next to Carter Scott’s obviously self-written bio–which was more padded than her chest–was clearly taken twenty years ago and was photoshopped into oblivion even then.  Seriously, I don’t know what it is with sopranos and refusing to look their age.  My mom is a fabulous soprano and she doesn’t wear hooker make-up or dig up decades-old headshots and hope that the audience is nearsighted.

I could excuse the vanity and the inflated program biography if she had the talent to make up for it.  She didn’t.  True, Verdi is a challenging composer and the solo soprano parts are incredibly nerve-wracking, but if you can’t do it, don’t, and she couldn’t do it.  She could never just hit a note.  She had to “scoop” up to a note from a few steps below it at the start of every phrase.  This was made especially unbearable because her thick-as-gravy (the kind of gravy that you choke on and die from) vibrato.  If you remember the fat opera-singing duck from the cartoon Duck Tales, envision her as a skinny-ish soprano with failed lip implants and you have the “critically acclaimed” Carter Scott.  I don’t know if it was the constant “scooping” of notes, the unbearable and inconsistent vibrato or the painfully flat notes in what would have been one of the most beautiful parts of the Requiem that did it for me, but something about her slip-shod performance tonight made me want to spork out my eyeballs.  Her bio mentions three Verdi operas in which she received “critical acclaim.”  Being such a Verdi aficionado, why was her voice nervous and fluttery for the first hour of the Mass?

Scott sang much more confidently in the second hour, but one can assume she had a few gulps of gin during intermission to calm her nerves.  Her nervousness was gone, but it was replaced by a new impediment:  she was consistently half a beat behind the chorus any time they were supposed to sing in unison with the soprano.  In one section, I believe it was the “Agnus Dei,” the four soloists are supposed to sing in unison, each in their own octave.  The four-octave split is generally very impressive.  Once again, she came in late, throwing off the mezzo-soprano who then dove to a flatness of almost a full step.  This sent the entire chorus scurrying about the scale like mice trying to find which soloist was not involved in the train wreck to take their pitch off of.  Not only was the “critically acclaimed” Ms. Scott ruining her own performance, she had to drag other people down with her.  Within a measure, everyone was back on their feet and none of the seventy-and-older crowd seemed to notice or mind or be awake, but a few of us music fags in the audience cringed and gritted our teeth.

Maybe she just had an off day.

Apart from the disaster of a soprano, this was one of the most impressive performances of Verdi’s Requiem I’ve ever heard.  If I was wearing a hat, it would be off for Maestro Wiley and Chorus Master Hugo right now.  Bravo, sirs!

Giuseppe Verdi wrote twenty-six operas, his most famous being Aida, La traviata, Rigoletto and Otello.  He was an Atheist, philanderer and all-around badass.

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