Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Sir Neville Marriner, Sylvia McNair, Carolyn Watkinson, Francisco Araiza, Robert Lloyd - Mozart: Requiem / McNair, Watkinson, Araiza, Lloyd; Marriner

This recording of the Süssmayr completion of Mozart's beloved Requiem remains one of the most interpretively faithful and musically satisfying versions in the catalog. Sir Neville Marriner, whose contribution to the soundtrack of the film Amadeus helped launch a worldwide Mozart revival, delivers Mozart's inspired music with a masterful command of style and substance. He's not trying to prove anything, but rather lets the music deliver its own profound and moving messages. --David Vernier Amazon.com

From the heart

So much emotion! Mozart's Requiem deals with death, the most human of all experience. The most heavy, the most painfull, and in this case, the most beautiful. It's about dying, it's about hell, and it is about redemption. You can feel the sorrow and the finallity of it all when you listen to this. A masterpiece among masterpieces. July 16, 2008

Mozart's Best Done Well

I'm not what you call an average listener of classical music. I listen to a lot of music that does not fall into this category. Mozart was famous for his chamber music and he excelled at that. This is NOT his chamber music. The music is tormented, dark and haunting. This is what you'd expect music to sound like if it was composed from your deathbed. Full of emotion, power, sorrow, and every other emotion from the spectrum, You feel what Mozart felt when he composed this. The range of music he was capable of is nothing short of incredible. "Lacrimosa", "Dies Irae", "Confutatis"; All excellent examples. July 13, 2008

Buckle up for a ride

A great representation of the original score. I know this requiem by heart, having listened to it and others several thousands of times. It is lively and most true.. Tempos are brisk, and the arrangement matches the original score better than any other, in my opinion. However, as another reviewer stated on this theme, the mixing is awful, drowning out the orchestra so much so that time one wonders if it is there. That said, it remains the best out there. March 8, 2008

was 5 stars in 1991. It is 2008. Philips: PLEASE REMASTER THIS GEM !

I will not add to the existing reviewers' consensus on the sublime performance. It is outrageous this recording has not been remastered to 24-bit/96kh or even to SACD or DVD-A, but is only available in the pathetic CD technology that was state of the art in 1991. This would have made a fine candidate for Philips' 50 great recordings series from a few years ago... Better late than never, please? January 16, 2008

divine perspective nor experience with death required

When the Carmelite priest Roland Murphy penned an exquisite commentary on the amorous biblical book called the SONG OF SONGS, it was observed that this might well stand as final evidence that experience is not a requirement of true knowledge.

From what this non-professional reviewer has gleaned of Mozart's life, he was unacquainted both with penitence and the spiritual sublimities of which this Requiem sings. Ditto the experience of death, though he (rightly) believed his own was impending.

As with Fr. Murphy, this proved no impediment to his skill with a pen. Then along comes a glorious cast, studded with the usual unsurpassable suspects (Neville Marriner & the ubiquitous Academy and Chorus of St Martin in the FIelds, for example) and the performance of a career (say, the outlandishly talented Sylvia McNair, she of the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music) to take up where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his pupil-in-arms Franz Xaver Süssmayr left off, with Costanze standing nervously by in hopes that the final check would soon arrive in the post.

The result is an ineffably beautiful academic hour of music, the kind that reminds one why there will ever be only one Mozart to interpret, reinterpret, and then to be honored for his wily, irreverent genius. Well did the pious Salieri in the memorable fictitious film look at Mozart's life wonder how God could make divine music flow from the soul of an impious fool. May such divine ironies multiply.

Any music that emerges from under Marriner's baton is precise, a feature that serves particularly well when Mozart is on the stand. Nevertheless, precision does not here supplant passion. The dynamic range produced by the ensemble(s) and recorded by Philips is awesome and moving.

The intertwining, quasi-fugal play of the voices in the opening statement ('Requiem') bears careful hearing over and over again. Each part achieves its own nobility, this with a clarity that loses nothing as one layer is placed over another. Then listen to the consonantal entrance of each part in the 'Kyrie'. This is astonishing choral work, undergirded by the expected instrumental excellence. Teased by McNair's brief flurry in the 'Requiem', by the end of the choral fireworks of the 'Kyrie' and 'Dies Irae', one is left almost panting for the soloists to bring it on.

I'm almost ashamed to gush this way, but let me gush on: Araiza's tenor follows Robert Lloyd's bass, then cedes to the contralto Watkinson, then ... How does a man find music like this in his head? How does it get to his pen, or to his student's? And--the mind races beyond Mozart and reviews--how do materialists manage to bang on about their thing in a world where such beauty happens?

Gott sei dank for a world in which unholy fools write sacred music and musicians like this perform it with such scientific precision and soul's passion. In this place, Salieri meets his better and the reverent Mr. Bach, perhaps, meets his equal. The latter--if historical sequence could be reversed--would not quarrel, but rather scratch yet again that familiar final attribution in recognition of the source of his less godly precursor's gift: soli deo gloria. December 24, 2007

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