Messa da Requiem
Prior to the 18th century, before it became popularized for secular concert performance, a Requiem, the Catholic mass for the dead, was a holy ritual accompanied by music. Verdi’s Requiem is filled with the drama you might expect from someone often referenced as the greatest Italian opera composer. Heart-pounding and heart-wrenching, elaborate, startling, and thrilling…all describe Verdi’s Requiem. It’s also appropriately somber and mournful at times, typical for any funeral mass, but it’s not all death and doom. Of Verdi’s Requiem, Johannes Brahms said, “Only a genius could have written such a work.” Alexandra makes her Pittsburgh Concert Chorale debut with this performance.