Touring the more rural college campuses in the United States with Victoria’s Requiem is a very modern challenge. To be sure, the inmates of these Young People’s Homes have little experience of performers and performances which do not actively sell themselves, so I can imagine that the reality of 11 people standing more or less motionless on a stage, singing one of the most contemplative pieces of music ever written for 45 minutes, might come over as a bit novel. In fact it must count as the polar opposite of literally everything the television stations serve them up.
Mindful of the difficulty, I recently introduced a performance of this Requiem at a university in Tennessee by pointing out that it was not intended as concert music, but as music for a funeral. I invited the audience, largely made up of students, to imagine they were in a Gothic chapel with a stiff laid out in an open coffin in front of them.
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