Duruflé. Mendelssohn. Elgar

Maurice Duruflé's Requiem for Soloists, Chorus and Organ (1947) occupies a special position in this French composer and organist’s legacy. The words “Requiem aeternam” (“Eternal peace”) form the start of a Catholic prayer for the repose of the dead. In the Baroque and Classical era, composers wrote church songs to this canonical Latin text, which were performed during services for the dead. From the late 18^th century, from Mozart’s times, the requiem lost its cult character and its performances were moved to the concert stage. In turning to the requiem genre, Duruflé continued the connection with the spiritual and artistic legacy of past centuries. But the form, the expressive means and the character of the work do not coincide with the normal interpretation of the genre. The composer created a requiem where the main idea is not death and scenes of the Day of Judgement (as it was with Mozart, Verdi and Berlioz), but rather Faith, Rest, Peace and Love; where the image of death is seen as a long-awaited release, the transition to higher spheres of non-existence.
Anna Kolenkova

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) was a German pianist, organist, conductor and composer. He was born in a Jewish family which converted to Protestantism. The wonderful education he received in his youth made him one of the most enlightened people of the age. He knew many foreign languages, was an excellent artist and was a passionate admirer of philosophy. A pupil of Zelter and Henning, he also became one of the greatest German pianists, starting to compose his own works at the age of twelve.
His frequent travels to Great Britain (from 1829 to 1847), France (1816, 1825 and 1830) and Italy (1830) brought Mendelssohn the composer international acclaim.
Having settled in Berlin, he promoted and performed Bach’s St Matthew Passion (1829). Later Mendelssohn was appointed Director of Music in Dusseldorf (1833) and he transformed Leipzig into one of Germany’s greatest music centres, directing the Gewandhaus and founding a conservatoire there.
Mendelssohn’s music, which became widely known following the triumph of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream, impresses with its clarity, its unforced expression, the sensitivity of its melodies and the brilliant orchestration.

The art of Edward Elgar (1857–1934) came to embody in music the Imperial might of “good old England” in the Victorian era. Probably that is why (particularly in the composer’s early and later periods before World War I) a sense of measure and peace, good-natured majesty and well-being often flow from Elgar’s music.
Edward Elgar was the fourth child of an average and large middleclass family. Not long before his birth, Elgar’s mother adopted the Catholic faith, in which she also raised her son. In part this can explain why in his music the composer turned to the standard Catholic liturgical hymns Te Deum (Thee, O God, we praise) and Benedictus, written for the Three Choirs’ Festival in Hereford in 1897. Several years later, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches drove the London public wild in delight and brought the composer long-awaited and deserved acclaim.
Despite Elgar’s adherence to the Catholic faith, the compositions Te Deum and Benedictus were never actually intended to be performed at a church service. In accordance with the traditions of late Romanticism, these are not traditional complimentary religious hymns (apropos, the texts are in English, and not in the normal Latin) but rather kinds of poems in two parts, written for chorus and organ and intended purely for concert performance.
Konstantin Greshnevikov