Verdi’s Requiem is performed without chorus after a Covid infection
NewsThe Grafenegg Festival was forced to reconfigure its Verdi Requiem this weekend after a member of the Wiener Singverein tested positive for Covid-19, despite having a double vaccination.
The entire chorus was sent home.
The Requiem was performed without the Introit and Sanctus by the Tonkünstler Orchestra and conductor Yutaka Sado with soloists Krassimira Stoyanova, Clementine Margaine, Piotr Beczala and Rene Pape.
Michael Schade writes: I just heard my first ever performance of a Verdi Requiem WITHOUT a choir – fabulous Piotr Beczala and the amazing Rene Pape ( so great to run into these old friends!) and the ever young Kressimira Stoyanova – simply divine – the whole thing though, was unbelievable in many more ways than one- good Job Grafenegg Festival for keeping the performance alive, (did I mention it was the opening of the Festival?! – Wow hard luck!) despite the fact that due to a Covid case of one of the choristers yesterday , the choir was barred from performing
Requiem without chorus is like ordering hamburger hold the burger.
Depends on the Requiem. Victoria’s can sound quite lovely with six singers.
A Requiem without a chorus is like a … (find your favorite metaphor).
The fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony without the cymbals and timpani. Or Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” without the joy. Or Richard Strauss’ “Salome” without Jochanaan’s kopf.
The comment system is still fucked up. Or is it intentional that follow-up comments gift copy thumbs to every comment above its own level? Maybe to make it seem that more people voted than actually did?
How to reproduce this:
1. Up- or downvote an ANSWER to THIS comment.
2. Reload the page.
3. Congrats, you magically up- or downvoted THIS comment, too.
Yay. How is this still a thing… Patch Tuesday? No?
Yay!
Hmmmm, . . . how about if they send the soloists home instead, and keep the choral parts? Actually, the bassoon quartet is my favorite passage in the Requiem.
A total musical waste of time singing a Verdi Requiem with a quartet instead of with a chorus of 100+. Sounds like a case of the music carved up and coming last in the list after money coming first at any cost. If it can’t be done properly, shouldn’t be done at all. Changing to the Mozart Requiem would have been a more satisfying experience with a quartet.
A case. Not an illness, not a hospitalisation, not a death. Just a case. Might even have been a false positive.
Insanity.
. . . until it isn’t. Ask those who are seriously ill or have already died.
Positives are real. Negatives can be false; those who find in false negatives false reassurance go on to transmit covid. Those who spread false rumors also contribute to the spread of the disease.
Positive PCR tests can mean anything and nothing. It’s an unsuitable method to be used alone, without symptoms, to diagnose actual disease and transmittability to others. And that’s a known fact to all virologists. Yet…
Its possible to get both false positives and false negatives. But the test is nevertheless good enough that mostly it gets it right. If the person tested postive then they will very likely have Covid. Remember, something like half of unvaccinated people will have no/few symptoms when they get Covid, and even fewer will get ill among the vaccinated.
A member of the chorus tested positive despite having a double vaccination. So they reconfigured Verdi’s “Manzoni Requiem” and it became Verdi’s “Covid Requiem.” Perhaps they should have performed Richard Strauss’ “Death and Reconfiguration” instead.
I know the world sneers, and with reason, at those old “opera without voices” recordings that used to be popular; it certainly never occurred to me to add the Verdi Requiem to that particular catalog!
Speaking as a (former) orchestra musician, though, even though it was a half century ago I remember rehearsals of the Verdi Requiem before we had our first rehearsal with chorus and singers, and it still packs a punch and conveys much of its message from beginning to end without anybody singing. I think the most “damaged” parts would be where the chorus sings quietly. Where they are singing as loudly as they can there’s usually ample instrumental doubling.
Thus I agree that maybe the Introit would seem to be the most seriously hobbled and missing that sense of mystery (although if the solo quartet filled in and sang at least the initial chorus parts, it could still be effective [one-to-a-part Verdi Requiem? Joshua Rifkin would be so proud]), but the Sanctus not so much damaged because the orchestra is being worked hard too.
Yeah, everyone in the audience would know something is missing even if they’d never heard the Verdi Requiem, but the piece is so well known I’d have to think most in the audience could imagine the missing stuff and still enjoy the music in an emergency situation like this.
The photograph shows Verdi grumbling on reading about the covid case in the newspaper.
So did the soloists sing the choral parts where feasible:?
So sorry to have missed the world premiere of Re by Ve – a chorus-featured masterpiece by arguably the greatest choral composer ever – minus the chorus. Please remind me to get tickets to the next World Cup that will be played without the ball.
I remember the time when somebody sick was sent home so the rest of us could continue our lives. But we’re being managed by covidiots. We learned from eugenicist Fauci’s e-mails that there’s no such thing as asymptomatic spread and lockdowns were unnecessary but covidiots refuse to accept reality. PCR tests are being discontinued by the CDC exactly because they produce up to 90% of false positives. So you were lied to. If you do happen to catch this thing, you have a 99,97% chance of surviving it if you do NOTHING about it. Yes that’s how insane these “trust the science” clowns have become. Now the so called va((ines are being exposed as useless: people still catch covid after taking the two doses. Mind-controlled zombies are lining up for the 3rd dose anyway. Nevermind that 3/4 of delta variant cases are among the va((inated and 4 in 5 of hospitalized are patients who got both shots, by CDC’s own admission.
What a load of made up rubbish.
No worse than the Brahms Requiem performed with two pianos instead of orchestra.