ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 25, 1996 TAG: 9610250033
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
One of the greatest choral works ever written gets a local production this weekend in Blacksburg.
The Blacksburg Master Chorale, augmented by the Virginia Tech Concert Choir and the university's Meistersingers, will perform the great Requiem in D Minor of Mozart Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Blacksburg High School auditorium. The full-scale performance, which will have about 180 singers and an orchestra of 28 players, will be conductor Kevin Fenton's inaugural concert as the new director of the Blacksburg Master Chorale.
"We've been working on this since the end of August, and it would be a rewarding experience even if we didn't have a performance at the end of it," said Fenton. "Before doing this piece I phoned several of my friends who'd done it, and they all said it had been a unifying experience for them, a different kind of experience from anything else they'd ever done."
Fenton, who is a professor of music education and director of choirs at Virginia Tech, said his friends' prediction has held true in Blacksburg. "The singers are really loving working on this piece. There have been many times at the end of rehearsal when they've just applauded."
Even if you think you don't know the Mozart Requiem, there's a good chance
you've heard a bit of it lately without realizing it, said Fenton. The "Dies irae" movement has been heard on a TV commercial for the Visa Gold Card, noted the conductor.
Mozart's Requiem is one of those classical pieces that have accumulated legendary stories like barnacles on a ship. The process started at the very beginning, when a mysterious visitor came to Mozart's door in the summer of 1791 with a commission for a requiem mass. Mozart, said the visitor, must produce the work in secrecy, telling no one of the project. The ailing, poverty-stricken composer morbidly regarded the "grey messenger" as an emissary of Death, and became obsessed with the notion that the work was intended to commemorate his own demise.
In fact, the Requiem in D Minor was to be Mozart's final work, but the "grey messenger's" ominous request had a more prosaic explanation. A local count who wanted to perform the work in memory of his wife was behind the commission, and he requested secrecy in order that he might pass off the mass as his own composition.
Mozart didn't manage to complete the project, and his wife asked the composer's pupil Franz Sussmayer to finish it, a circumstance that has made careers for generations of scholars who have tried to figure out just which man wrote what. Sussmayer claimed to have had special instructions from Mozart about how the greater composer wanted the work concluded.
Fenton says he doesn't lose any sleep over the authorship problem. "I'm coming from the side that says that Mozart wrote most of it. I realize that Sussmayer took credit for some of it, but my position is that he just wasn't skilled enough to do what he said he did."
Mozart's Requiem in D Minor uses a solo quartet in addition to the larger choir. Tech voice teacher Nancy McDuffie will sing the soprano part, along with mezzo-soprano Patricia O'Brien of Liberty University and tenor David Holley from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The bass soloist will have come a considerably longer distance than anybody else for Saturday night's performance. Lee Lassiter, a 35-year-old amateur singer from Topeka, Kan., flew in earlier this week especially for the performance. Fenton says that Lassiter is one of finest basses he has ever worked with.
Reached last weekend at his home in Topeka, Lassiter said he is an accountant with Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas, though his busy part-time singing career has taken him as far away as St. Petersburg, Russia, in recent years.
"I love this requiem. It's very typical Mozart, a very complex work. What's hard about it from the bass point of view is that almost the most difficult thing you have to sing is there right off the bat: a trombone does the entrance, and you basically have to echo the trombone line and come back in by yourself. The challenge is not only to hit the low notes but to hit them in such a way that they balance out with the other singers," said Lassiter.
For an added dimension of period authenticity, the orchestra for this performance will feature performers on the bassett horn, an ancestor of the clarinet that was used in Mozart's day but which is rarely heard in modern renditions. The entire concert will be devoted to the Requiem. Tickets are still available for Saturday night's performance at $8, with $4 admission for senior citizens and students.
The Blacksburg Master Chorale, the Virginia Tech Concert Choir and Meistersingers, will perform Mozart's Requiem in D Minor Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Blacksburg High School auditorium. Tickets are $8, with $4 admission for senior citizens and students.
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: LORA GORDON/Special to The Roanoke Times. Walt Niehausby CNBconcentrates on the conductor as he, Meg Meloy (to the left of
Walt), and other singers rehearse for Saturday's performance of
Mozart's Requiem. color.