Lux Aeterna - VERDI: Messa da Requiem

Abbado, Claudio, Caballé, Montserrat, Carreras, Jose, Norman, Jessye

DVD 101451

The documentary by Norbert Beilharz is a film about Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem and a film about transience. At the same time, it is also a film about the conductor Claudia Abbado, some well-known singers as well as the choir and orchestra of the Milan Teatro alla Scala. The soloists are Montserrat Caballé and Cecilia Gasdia (soprano), Lucia Calentini-Terrani (mezzo-soprano), Peter Dvorsky and Chris Merritt (tenor) and Samuel Ramey (bass); This film was made in Milan in 1985, where Verdi's Requiem was performed again for the 200th birthday of the poet Alessandro Manzoni. The death of Alessandro Manzoni in 1873, for whom Verdi felt almost religious veneration, struck the master, who was then the greatest living composer in Italy at the time, and who was currently in a creative crisis. The Messa da Requiem is undoubtedly a deeply personal composition by Verdi, which expresses the author's most secret fears in the confrontation with his own mortality; at the same time it is also a highly "public work, by which the national poet as well as the whole Italian soul should be honored - in a musical language that embodied the great tradition of Italian music and Italian culture, the disappearance of which Verdi believed to see at the time.

DVD

13.11.2007

807280145199