Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem in D minor, K626

1791: a busy year for Mozart who, when he received a commission for a Requiem, was already working on Die Zauberflöte and had a deadline to deliver La clemenza di Tito. Everyone knows what happened next: the commission postponed, exhaustion and death, a work left unfinished and which, after several composers were approached, was finally completed by Süssmayr. This version gradually became established as the closest to Mozart’s intentions, but is not free of faulty part-writing and orchestration. In 2016 a young French composer, Pierre-Henri Dutron, persuaded René Jacobs to perform his own revision of the Requiem completed by Süssmayr. This new version was created with great success in a series of five concerts around Europe in November 2016. We now present its first studio recording, released exclusively on harmonia mundi.

Choir members are the virtuosos here. Their flexibility enables them to enrich or bleach vocal colour, and flood or dry up volume levels, to the subtlest degree. Jacobs plays the choir like an instrument, as he does the band. The shapes he coaxes from words, and the force he provokes from the ensemble, open out the new dimensions of Dutron’s score. — BBC Music Magazine, January 2018