Post Description

The so-called Requiem, a setting of secular poetry about war, composed in the mid-Sixties in the shadow of Britten's War Requiem  but before Shostakovich's Fourteenth (which it perhaps influenced), is an hour-long work of consistent interest and intermittent beauty which somehow, though, fails to shake the withers, as must have been the intention.

Two of the concerts with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra were conducted by a familiar face at the Bregenz Festival in 2010, the Russian conductor Vladimir Fedoseyev, who for many years was a personal friend of Weinberg's and to whom his 17th Symphony is dedicated. Weinberg, a refugee who witnessed from afar the destruction of his family, had an exceptionally sensitive ear to the voices of the threatened. In his exquisite and deeply moving 6th symphony as in the recently discovered Requiem these voices are the voices of children. 

REQUIEM, op. 96 für Sopran, Knabenchor, Chor und Orchester

Elena Kelessidi, Sopran
Wiener Sängerknaben
Prager Philharmonischer Chor, 
Wiener Symphoniker Dir. Vladimir Fedoseyev

Bregenzer Festspiele, Festspielhaus, 1 August 2010
Broadcast: Deutschlandradio Kultur