Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts, with its multiple timpani, four brass bands and huge choir, was premiered in the lofty confines of the church at Invalides in Paris in 1837. Immersed in the monumental wall of sound that is the messe itself, however, one can’t help but wonder if Berlioz was secretly thinking “St Peter’s or bust!”
Edinburgh’s roomy Usher Hall would be a mere anteroom to the Vatican’s local, of course, but it’s no bad venue, nonetheless, with its cavernous central well and ranks of balconies, in among which the brass ensembles of the massively expanded Philharmonia Orchestra found their spot.
Berlioz’s sombre requiem has an almost brutalist sense of modernity, arising from a scything of extraneous ornament in the creation of the super-massive architectural whole. It was a fitting vehicle for the Philharmonia’s chief conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who sculpted its distinctive and discrete orchestral and choral parts with clean, controlled power. There were occasional lapses of synchronicity between orchestra and choir, but the combined forces found the sense of absence writ large in Berlioz’s mass. It was there in the space between the notes, in the humanity and humility of the silence between a low trombone and a high flute, between the impassioned cry in the Sanctus of Lawrence Brownlee’s Italianate tenor and the response of the angelic sopranos.
And if there were a few ropey entries, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus were impressive in both articulation and responsiveness under their excellent chorus master Christopher Bell. Alternately circumspect and fervent, they brooded in the powerful Dies Irae, and were immaculate and delicate in the quiet of the Quaerens me.
When the immense forces conflated, Judgment Day brass ensembles and all, it was like sitting inside a vast organ. But it was all brought back to nought at the end with a humble, human-scale pizzicato in the Philharmonia’s massed strings.