Scottish Camber Orchestra And Chorus/Sir Charles Mackerras SACD Released May 5, 2003

9-May-03

The second recording in Linn's collaboration with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a recording of Mozart's great last work, the Requiem.The Requiem is conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, the SCO's Conductor Laureate and the world's leading interpreter of Mozart's music. Stock is now in the Linn warehouse and this recording will be available from Monday 5 May.Mozart's Requiemóthe composer's last and unfinished workówas commissioned by Count Franz von Wallsegg, who wished to have it performed in memory of his departed wife as his own composition. In order not to forfeit the handsome commission fee, Mozart's widow Constanze decided to have the work completed in secrecy, so that the finished version could be presented as her husband's final effort. The Requiem is known now in the version undertaken by Mozart's pupil Franz Xaver S?ssmayr.S?ssmayr based his completion on Mozart's virtually complete score of the Introitus and drafts of all sections from the Kyrie fugue to the Hostias. These contain the completed vocal parts (solo and chorus) and the orchestral bass line, with occasional motives for the orchestral accompaniment. However, the Lacrimosa breaks off after the eighth bar. To these Mozartean materials S?ssmayr added settings of the SANCTUS/Hosanna, Benedictus, AGNUS DEI and COMMUNION (Lux aeterna óCum sanctis tuis). (The COMMUNION is merely a newly texted version of part of the INTROITUS and of the Kyrie fugue.)The key question about S?ssmayr's version is whether any of the portions of the Requiem that are not in Mozart's hand were based on his ideas. Although S?ssmayr claimed to have composed these alone, they display the tight motivic construction of Mozart's fragment, in which a small number of themes recurs from movement to movement. (S?ssmayr's own music lacks such motivic interrelationships.) Perhaps, then, the ""few scraps of music"" Constanze Mozart remembers giving to S?ssmayr together with Mozart's manuscript contained material not found in Mozart's draft. Mozart also may have suggested certain ideas to S?ssmayr on the piano.A clear evaluation of the movements S?ssmayr claimed to have composed is clouded by unmistakable discrepancies within them between idiomatically Mozartean lines and grammatical and structural flaws that are utterly foreign to Mozart's idiom. First attacked in 1825, these include glaring errors of voice leading in the orchestral accompaniment of the SANCTUS and the awkward, truncated Hosanna fugue. Furthermore, S?ssmayr brings back this fugue after the Benedictus in B-flat major rather than the original D majoróin conflict with all church music of the time.The version heard in this recording seeks to address the problems of instrumentation, grammar and structure within S?ssmayr's version while respecting the 200-year-old history of the Requiem. A clearly drawn line of separation, in which everything except the contents of Mozart's autograph was to be considered spurious per se, was explicitly rejected. Rather, the goal was to revise not as much, but as little as possible, attempting in the revisions to observe the character, texture, voice leading, continuity and structure of Mozart's music. The traditional version has been retained insofar as it agrees with idiomatic Mozartean practice.

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