Elisabetta Brusa (b. 1954)
Requiem, Op. 25 (2021)
Stabat Mater, Op. 24 (2020)
Réka Kristóf (soprano); Dorottya Láng (contralto); István Horváth (tenor); Marcell Bakonyi (bass)
Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra & Choir/Riccardo Frizza
rec. 2023, Studio 6, Media Services and Support Trust Fund, Budapest, Hungary
Latin texts and English translations supplied
Naxos 8.574589 [65]
For more than 30 years Elisabetta Brusa taught composition and orchestration at the Milan Conservatory. She had been a student there herself, after which she came to England to continue studies with Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Keller. Her career has been distinguished by a number of prizes and fellowships. Her own description of her musical style, as found on her Wikipedia page, is ‘close to Neo-Tonality and in particular to Neo-Romanticism’, though she qualifies these terms. Her harmony is ‘essentially pandiatonic with panchromatic moments’. Something easier to grasp is to be found on her website, where she is described as a composer who has ‘elected to write music in a tonal style that communicates with the public’. Her music has been well served by Naxos, with four previous discs that present her two symphonies alongside other orchestral music. There now appears this fifth programme made up of two recent vocal and choral works.
At 54 minutes, Brusa’s is one of the longer settings of the Requiem text, and she includes several passages that other composers preferred to omit. The text appears in the booklet alongside an English translation, though a few short passages are missing. The composer provides her own booklet note, though understanding it can be a challenge. ‘For me, [a Requiem] is as an important part of a composer’s oeuvre as a symphony or a string quartet.’ One can share this point of view, whilst also noting the immense challenge any composer faces to find new and convincing music for a text that has already been set by so many earlier composers, the greatest among them. Most of Brusa’s music has been written for orchestra, though here ‘I felt the need to maintain a certain relationship between the vocal parts and the orchestra so that the latter would never be overwhelming but remain discrete…The vocal counterpoint and the orchestration are deliberately essential in order to give an archaic atmosphere.’ The orchestra, then, is very much the accompanist, though the woodwind writing at the beginning of the Lux aeterna is just one of several imaginative touches.
The opening movement gives a reliable taster of what is to follow. Harmonies are diatonic with colourful chromatic additions. The overall atmosphere is similar to many recent settings from Rutter onwards. The peaceful prayer is twice interrupted by more forceful demands. There follows a Kyrie in a surprising waltz-like metre, before a sudden change to the violent, timpani-dominated Christe. In the Dies irae the grip on tonality is more tenuous; the music, highly dissonant in response to the text, features what are, to my ears, rather conventional, empty gestures. More original is the restrained use of the trumpets in the Tuba mirum, a lovely touch that complements the excellent mezzo-soprano soloist. The composer writes in the booklet that the ‘vocal parts are often pushed to the limit of their extensions’, and this characteristic does her performers no favours. Réka Kristóf, for instance, struggles to make an agreeable sound in the ultra-high passages in the Rex tremendae, as does the tenor, István Horváth, in the Lux aeterna where the high tessitura is compounded by much fortissimo writing. This is a pity, as the soloist has a most agreeable voice in the middle register. Marcell Bakonyi, too, struggles to make sense of some very low-lying phrases in the Ingemisco. The Hungarian Radio Choir does the job, and then some, but there are a few shaky moments. The sopranos are under pressure, for example, in the Benedictus, and one wonders if this fine group would have benefitted from longer acquaintance with the work.
Brusa’s Requiem is clearly an intensely personal work for the composer, and it shows through a number of original features. Listeners who have Verdi’s Requiem in their heads will find that Brusa’s solution for the words ‘salva me’ in the Rex tremendae section, though different, installs itself just as solidly in the listener’s mind. There is some fine and effective writing for the choir in the Domine Jesu, with the music passed frequently from one section to another, before a mainly unaccompanied Hostias. There is no attempt to evoke the Sanctus bell; instead, we have a men’s duet over unusual ‘walking’ accompaniment. This is refreshing, as are the rather restrained Hosannas. It is in the Libera me that the composer reserves perhaps her biggest surprise. Its march-like opening is conventional enough, but where most composers allow the music to subside towards a calm ending she chooses to close the work with fortissimo demands of eternal rest, a most unusual feature.
Brusa writes that her Stabat Mater was composed as ‘a trial for the Requiem’; is this why it comes over to me as rather insubstantial, almost provisional? Scored for soprano and orchestra, with no choir, the diatonic dissonances in the orchestral introduction are affecting and promising, and presage the eight-syllable, stressed-unstressed rhythm of the text. The first passage portrays the mother of Christ grieving below the Cross, before the focus changes and the text becomes a prayer invoking Mary’s help and her natural goodness. The music is more rapid here, only returning to the original rhythmic scheme for the closing minutes. The work ends on the sweetest of major key cadences. There can be no complaints about Réka Kristóf’s performance, though once again she is faced with passages in the vocal stratosphere barely justified by the words. None the less she comes across as a singer with much character as well as beauty of voice, and she is aided by a more realistic recorded balance than in the Requiem where the soloists are recessed in the overall sound picture.
William Hedley
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