John Harbison’s Requiem Setting: For Our Times?

courtesy of Naxos of America

Today Naxos released a recording in its American Classics series devoted entirely to John Harbison’s setting of the text for the Requiem Mass. This is a world premiere recording, even though Harbison completed the composition in 2002. The back cover of the album of the CD describes the piece as “Completed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks;” but I feel this is not particularly fair to Harbison, his work practices, or the mindset behind the work’s creation. As we learn from Harbison’s contribution to the accompanying booklet, he began work on the idea of setting the Requiem text in 1985, a time when the very thought that any foreign power might bring destruction and fatality to our own country was, for all intents and purposes, beyond reason of all but a relatively small coterie of strategic analysts.

More interesting is how an undertaking, which proceeded in fits and starts over the course of sixteen years, came to take shape and what that resulting shape was. The more useful content on the back cover concerns how structure that emerged, which is basically a division of the Requiem text into two parts. In the final paragraph of his booklet notes, Harbison distills his thoughts on the nature of that text down to a single sentence:

An accidental collection of words about mortality (part I) and continuity (part II), to be shaped into a purposeful collection of sounds.

My guess is that those for whom the Requiem text has deep religious significance might be put off by this description. On the other hand those who are seriously devout about celebrating the Requiem Mass are as likely to be put off by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hector Berlioz, and Giuseppe Verdi as they would be by Harbison’s choice of words. What strikes me as most interesting about Harbison’s composition has less to do with any article of faith than with his approach to giving his work and overall logic. Each of those two parts is conceived as a continuous whole, thus departing from pretty much every musical setting of the text that those familiar with the repertoire are likely to encounter.

On the other hand, from a strictly musical point of view, this piece comes across as a decidedly contemporary approach to past traditions encountered in earlier settings of the text. Thus, both harmonic progression and richly woven polyphony signify as the underlying concepts as each of the two parts of structure unfold. Modernist approaches to both of those disciplines often mask the words themselves; but there is nothing wrong with Harbison making the assumption (correct, for the most part) that listeners already know the words. More important is that those words are delivered through an ongoing flow of changing sonorities, and it is that flow of sonorities that realizes Harbison’s score as a “purposeful collection.”

On the performance side Harbison’s score benefits significantly from its interpretation. This begins with all four soloists providing compelling realizations of Harbison’s vocal lines: soprano Jessica Rivera, mezzo Michaela Martens, tenor Nicholas Phan, and baritone Kelly Markgraf. For that matter, Giancarlo Guerrero’s efforts in conducting the Nashville Symphony and the Nashville Symphony Chorus, as well as the soloists, did much to bring a convincing overall coherence to a musical plan based on an “accidental collection of words.” The result may not be the “spirit of a Requiem;” but the attentive listener will find much to engage the mind in the “flesh of the music.”