St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral Present's a Surprisingly Gentle Fauré's "Requiem"
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I then walked across Balboa Park to Fifth and Laurel, then ate dinner at the Mexican restaurant on Fifth and Nutmeg just across the street from St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, where we were going to attend the Sunday afternoon Evensong service and the following performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. The Evensong service came with a full program that also included the text of the Requiem, and there were spaces in it for audience participation through standing during parts of the service (which I was O.K. with) and joining in singing of the hymns (which I was not, mainly because I hadn’t brought my reading glasses and my rapidly deteriorating eyes would have been useless in trying to parse out the words from the printed texts, which included the music as well). I had thought Evensong was the kind of service where you didn’t have to do anything except sit (or stand) there and bask in the glory of the Lord. The Fauré Requiem was performed by the St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral choir, and the soloists were soprano Michelle Pérez and baritone Joshua Pierre Moore. Gabriel Arregui played an organ reduction of Fauré’s original chamber-orchestra accompaniment (they worked from the origin 1889 chamber version rather than the 1900 revision for full orchestra) because the church’s principal organist and music director, Martin Green, was busy conducting the choir. Fauré’s Requiem is a quiet piece about the stillness of the Great Beyond – if you want a requiem about the titanic struggle between life and death, between belief and unbelief, check out the ones by Berlioz, Verdi or Britten instead – and it mostly got a warm, sympathetic reading from the church forces. The most openly emotional moment of the performance was Joshua Pierre Moore’s fervent and almost anguished version of the next-to-last movement, “Libera Me,” in which he really seemed to respond to the text: “Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death.” My husband Charles said he was a bit put out by how many of the choristers were reading their parts off of tablets instead of paper scores, but hey, it’s the 21st century and that’s how we do things like this; I still remember when Harry Connick, Jr. took a big band out on tour in the late 20th century and announced that all the arrangements would be printed out on computer so the band members could have easy access to them and wouldn’t have to fumble around their music stands for paper parts.
Charles and I then walked across Balboa Park to Fifth and Laurel, then ate dinner at the Mexican restaurant on Fifth and Nutmeg just across the street from St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, where we were going to attend the Sunday afternoon Evensong service and the following performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. The Evensong service came with a full program that also included the text of the Requiem, and there were spaces in it for audience participation through standing during parts of the service (which I was O.K. with) and joining in singing of the hymns (which I was not, mainly because I hadn’t brought my reading glasses and my rapidly deteriorating eyes would have been useless in trying to parse out the words from the printed texts, which included the music as well). I had thought Evensong was the kind of service where you didn’t have to do anything except sit (or stand) there and bask in the glory of the Lord. The Fauré Requiem was performed by the St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral choir, and the soloists were soprano Michelle Pérez and baritone Joshua Pierre Moore. Gabriel Arregui played an organ reduction of Fauré’s original chamber-orchestra accompaniment (they worked from the origin 1889 chamber version rather than the 1900 revision for full orchestra) because the church’s principal organist and music director, Martin Green, was busy conducting the choir. Fauré’s Requiem is a quiet piece about the stillness of the Great Beyond – if you want a requiem about the titanic struggle between life and death, between belief and unbelief, check out the ones by Berlioz, Verdi or Britten instead – and it mostly got a warm, sympathetic reading from the church forces. The most openly emotional moment of the performance was Joshua Pierre Moore’s fervent and almost anguished version of the next-to-last movement, “Libera Me,” in which he really seemed to respond to the text: “Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death.” My husband Charles said he was a bit put out by how many of the choristers were reading their parts off of tablets instead of paper scores, but hey, it’s the 21st century and that’s how we do things like this; I still remember when Harry Connick, Jr. took a big band out on tour in the late 20th century and announced that all the arrangements would be printed out on computer so the band members could have easy access to them and wouldn’t have to fumble around their music stands for paper parts.
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