Post Description

Vers van de pers:

A few months ago the Society of Sound featured the LSO Live recording of Mahler?s Eighth Symphony. The recording was made in St Paul?s Cathedral during performances that were part of the City of London Festival.  Members of the Society of Sound community will remember that, in the introductory notes, we discussed the problems of recording a work as large and complex as Mahler?s Eighth Symphony in an acoustic with an echo that reverberates into the middle of next week.

Recording Verdi?s ?Requiem? for LSO Live presented the opposite challenge. Verdi wrote his famously operatic ?Requiem? in honour of the Italian writer and national hero Alessandro Manzoni. The first performance took place on the first anniversary of Manzoni?s death in St Mark?s Church, Milan. St Mark?s is a big church with an acoustic to match. The first UK performance was in the newly completed Royal Albert Hall. The Albert Hall also has a big acoustic and that was before the introduction of the famous ? or infamous  - ?flying saucers?. As anyone who has attended a concert in the Barbican Hall will know, the hall has virtues as a concert space, but a big acoustic is not one of them. 

 So, the challenge for Sir Colin Davis, the singers and the players was to build a performance which was true to Verdi?s composition but at the same made musical sense within the acoustics of the Barbican Hall. Sir Colin?s solution was an almost obsessive focus on phrasing, articulation and balance. He insisted that the best performances happen when the participants work with the acoustic qualities of the performing space rather than trying to change them. Performers are able to create their own acoustic if they will take the trouble to discover how to do so.

The challenge for the recording team was to find a way to support this process. Every recording presents its own set of technical problems. The solutions are always different and sometimes finding them means going back to basics ? not so different from the processes involved in creating a great loudspeaker. Listen to the recording and decide whether we all succeeded.