The grotesque unevenness of Mozart’s Requiem

It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the packaging these events come in, when they do. ENO relayed free a concert of Mozart’s Requiem, but it was preceded by a snatch of Strictly, with a row of muscular young guys ripping off their shirts, before we entered the Coliseum for a heavily pregnant Danielle de Niese hyping the event we were about to see and hear. She is delightful, but I wish she hadn’t been compelled to tell us that, despite his hard life, Mozart was sending us a message of hope that everyone, however ignorant of classical music, can be moved by. It’s just not true. Great music, which some of the Requiem is, demands total concentration and preferably some knowledge of the idiom, but not of the agonising circumstances in which it was composed.

However, once the performance, on a bare stage, began, it was clear that it would be a fine one.