ENO’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with soloists Elizabeth Llewellyn, Sarah Connolly, Ed Lyon and Gerald Finley was originally planned to be filmed in front of a social distanced Coliseum audience. England’s second lockdown put pay to that.
Elizabeth Llewellyn undoubtedly shone in the performance with a gentle, delicate sound that felt solid. It consoled, too. This was fantastic exposure for Llewellyn – really pleased for her. Gerald Finlay’s contribution was grave and warm (if the two words aren’t a contradiction).
(Don’t think I’m passing comment on Connolly and Lyon by not talking about them. It’s just that Llewellyn and Finlay were the voices I connected with most.)
Light was also shone on the impact distanced musicians has on performance. “The fragility of the arts has been exposed by this pandemic,” said Lucy Thraves to me earlier in the week. ENO’s performance also exposed the limitations of current mitigations.
The distance between conductor and chorus, so too that between individual singers, exposed how much our appreciation of music depends on proximity. To date this year, I think this is possibly the biggest music performance in terms of on-stage forces I’ve seen. And I wonder whether its the upper limit too right now. It was evident how distance placed greater demands on ensemble, with the disparity between voices and orchestra easy to detect in places. Speeds varied at times. I have taken ensemble for granted, that much is clear. The BBC Proms next year seems like a long long way away in terms of getting anywhere near what was experienced in 2019, for example.
The performance didn’t touch me in the way I’ve long anticipated billed performances of Mozart’s Requiem can be something for our collective emotions to coalesce around, though others might have felt differently. But there was a simplicity to the presentation that was the pleasing and an undoubted sense of occasion seeing classical music billed on a Saturday night at 7pm.
I’d like to think this was a test for other such TV broadcasts in the weeks and months to come. It would be something rather wonderful if classical music reasserted itself in the schedules, being made more visible to more people.
Mozart’s Requiem is available on BBC iPlayer until October 2021