I have exactly 11 recordings of this fantastic - it is Berlioz after all - work - and the recording which first made all of my spine tingle was the Boston Munch. It is often the case that it's that after First Love in music, there is nor can be no other. I love the Inbal, the first two Davis recordings, the Fremaux, the Bernstein, and even the Ozawa. I once owned the Abravanel - a conductor who did sterling work in the deserts of Utah, famous until then simply for Mormons - God bless em in their white shirts and black suits - but I must admit that on rehearing it today via Spotify, all I came away with was a deep sense of US provincialism. As for the tenor aria, the sound of a tenor voice is, after all, a subjective matter. I love Peter Schreier, for example, I bet you don't...Best regards. What a great work, what a great work. The ending always simply slays me into a slobbering mess. All in all, Hector B is quite possibly the most underrated musical genius of the lot. ( I admit that when I understood that Hector B was largely untutored, that he had a penchant for auto plagiarism, he rose appreciably in my estimation. In a weird way, he pre-dated Mahler. Yes, Berlioz also encompassed the universe...)
Thankyou Ralph Moore for your Berlioz Requiem Survey.
I assume that you are aware that Valery Gergiev conducted 2 Performances of it in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, with combined forces from the Mariinsky Theatre and the CBSO, on 14th and 15th October 2009. John Quinn reviewed the 2nd of those performances for Seen & Heard and there is a link to that review from his recent review of the Pappano recording for MWI.
However what John did not mention in his review, and therefore you may not be aware of, is that EMI Classics used those performances for an experiment in 'Instant Recording'. You could order a CD recording of that evening's performance on arrival at the hall and could collect your CDs, of the performance you had just heard, in the foyer afterwards. As I recall we had to wait for about 15 minutes for them. I attended both the performances and purchased the recordings of both of them, which I still have. There are definitely some differences, but not very significant, between the two performances. I should make it clear that the recordings were only of the Berlioz - not the Prokofiev Cantata which made up the first half of both the concerts.
It was clear from EMI at the time that these were 'Limited Edition' recordings, not for general release, though I have, from time to time, seen copies in second-hand CD shops. However since it seems clear, from the survey, that Gergiev has not made a 'commercial' recording, I would have thought that the existence of these recordings was worth a mention.
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