Since he stepped down as the BBC Symphony’s chief conductor five years ago, Jiří Bělohlávek’s reunions with his former orchestra have been for concert performances of operas by Janáček and Smetana. The programme this time was another large-scale Czech work, though choral not opera – Dvořák’s evening-long Requiem, first performed in 1891.
That premiere took place at the Birmingham festival which had commissioned it, one of several of Dvořák’s major choral works with strong British connections. His choral writing seems to have appealed to Victorian choral societies, and certainly the Requiem is worlds away from the theatricality of the other great requiem of the last decades of the 19th century, by Verdi. Much of Dvořák’s score seems quiet and introspective, designed to comfort the bereaved and ease the journey of the departed soul rather than confront the terror of the last judgement. Though the choral writing gets more conventional as the work goes on (and, in the fugues that close the Offertorium and the Hostias, predictable too) the orchestration is always striking, especially for the woodwind.
Bělohlávek brought all those instrumental colours to the fore in his typically unforced way. It was possible to imagine to imagine the Requiem getting a lusher performance from an orchestra and chorus with a more in-your-face sound than the BBCSO, but that wouldn’t necessarily have been a more musically truthful one. The soprano (Katerina Knezikova) and tenor (Richard Samek) soloists have a bigger share of the spotlight than the mezzo (Catherine Wyn-Rogers) and bass (James Platt), but all four seemed perfectly integrated into Bělohlávek’s approach.
