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Whistle Stopper - Faure: Requiem and other choral music
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List Price: $17.99
Our Price: $11.72
Your Save: $ 6.27 ( 35% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Collegium
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0040888010920
Label: Collegium
Manufacturer: Collegium
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Collegium
Release Date: 2000-02-29
Studio: Collegium
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Haunting
Comment: After hearing this piece of work on two different occasions on the same day, I felt that I needed to have it. All the choices always make it difficult to choose, so I ended up buying this version. I am utterly amazed with this beautiful piece of music, by its the performers and just the cd in general.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It's Beauty Revealed, At Last
Comment: This Collegium COLCD 109 is a later release of the Collegium COLCD 101 which I purchased circa 1985 after reading glowing reviews in Grammophone magazine. COLCD 101 is labeled Stereo/Digital. COLCD 109 is labeled Stereo/DDD. Is it a re-mastering? Liner notes don't say, but the new version provides noticeable improvements in vividness and clarity.
The release of COLCD 101 was a watershed event. John Rutter had questioned conventional performance versions of Faure's Requiem, those which used full symphony orchestras and Wagnerian-like soloists. Yes, it is a requiem, but Faure's ideas are very different than those found in, say, Verdi's Requiem. Instead of hellfire and damnation, Faure evokes serenity, peace and love. Rutter's historical research proved that Faure intended for his work to be performed in small, intimate settings where the orchestra and choir would be minimal and, maybe, use boy sopranos. Rutter's CD of the historical, 1893, version is like an expert restoration of an old painting where a century's grime is wiped away and the work is newly revealed in it's original beauty.
A 1990's CD of the 1893 version exists on Naxos 8.55076S by Jeremy Summerly and the Oxford Camerata. It, too, is beautiful and of similar performance quality, though conducted at a slightly slower tempo. I find Rutter's version more "right", but that's just personal preference.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Life has been engulfed in time
Comment: This requiem represents a complete shift in the general tone of the requiem as a genre. The vision of life and death is impregnated with a feminine light, the light of the ocean softly illuminated by the sunshine of Normandy, of the Graceful Coast. The figure that stands behind the music, that accompanies the dead person into the grave is no longer the masculine Germanic death that punishes man, nor even the furious feminine French death that challenges man, but the soft and comforting figure of the mother Mary, the universal comforter who takes the hand of each one of us, as if we were crying lost children, to make us pass the dangerous door that leads beyond life. This Holy Mary for whom Fauré has written so many Ave Marias, is promising us the end of time and our introduction into an everlasting stormless, painless and noiseless world that represents the very positive vision of a real world that is the negative vision of life. Photography is not far away. Everyday life becomes a life of strife, struggle, noise, violence, war, speed, work, exploitation and alienation, all elements seen as negative, and death is the negation of it all, is the positive virtuality that has to become our reality overthere. It is thus in perfect agreement with the vision the impressionists introduced to defy photography and bring art beyond the blaring image of reality a photographer brings up with his machine. The eye of the artist goes beyond those crude colors and forms to find light and life in the depth of his retina. Fauré is the impressionist painter of death as the real life beyond the surface we have to contemplate and suffer everyday. In other words virtual is beautiful and real is dreadful. Happiness has to be found in virtuality and not in reality. Fauré is bergsonian, who sees eternity beyond the flow of time. Fauré is proustian, who sees life beyond the loss of memory. This explains the erasing of the Dies Irae because there is no anger any more in the ascent to the eternal memory of what does not exist yet. This is a requiem of timelessness and nightlessness.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan
Customer Rating:
Summary: Requiem- a masterpiece.
Comment: This exquisite collection has so many gorgeous songs that move me to tears. In Sanctus, the violin is so pure, so beautiful, its wrings my heart. This is real music, real art, crafted with such care, that it is a true privilege to hear it, not to mention sing it (which I have done, and I loved it). It is an encredible CD, and I would encourage anyone to buy it.
Lilly
Customer Rating: 
Summary: high quality but lacking emotion
Comment: One reviewer describes this as "no lack of sadness, bright, not gloomy, filled with sunshine"; another calls it "peaceful". I might go with peaceful. The quality is high and the recording is of interest for being more faithful to Faure's original, non-orchestral version, but I found the performance notably lacking in emotion. I would steer the reader toward the more deeply moving Naxos version (conductor: Jeremy Summerly), which is something of a gem at budget price.
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Editorial Reviews:
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John Rutter's groundbreaking research and subsequent performing edition of Fauré's beloved Requiem has enabled us to hear the work as the composer originally intended. His first version of the piece included only a chamber orchestra with lower strings, harp, timpani, and organ. Four years later, Fauré added two movements and slightly expanded the orchestration. This is the version that Rutter and his inimitable Cambridge Singers perform here-- and it's a glorious revelation, especially if the only Fauré Requiem you've heard is that for full orchestra, which the composer himself neither created nor approved. Rutter and his singers give us a wonderfully sumptuous yet detailed performance that benefits tremendously from the newly realized clarity of inner lines and from the richly colored orchestral textures. --David Vernier
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