Duruflé: Requiem; Poulenc: Lenten Motets The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge & Stephen Layton

• Maurice Duruflé (1902 - 1986): Requiem, Op. 9:
• 1 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: I. Introït 03:42
• 2 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: II. Kyrie 03:55
• 3 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: III. Domine Jesu Christe 09:33
• 4 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: IV. Sanctus 03:12
• 5 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: V. Pie Jesu 03:47
• 6 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: VI. Agnus Dei 03:56
• 7 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: VII. Lux aeterna 04:26
• 8 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: VIII. Libera me 06:10
• 9 Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9: IX. In paradisum 03:40
• Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963): 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence, FP 97:
• 10 Poulenc: 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence, FP 97: No. 1, Timor et tremor 02:49
• 11 Poulenc: 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence, FP 97: No. 2, Vinea mea electa 03:45
• 12 Poulenc: 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence, FP 97: No. 3, Tenebrae factae sunt 04:00
• 13 Poulenc: 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence, FP 97: No. 4, Tristis est anima mea 03:02
• Total Runtime 55:57

Info for Duruflé: Requiem; Poulenc: Lenten Motets

One of the twentieth century’s best-loved choral works, Duruflé’s Requiem—a magical synthesis of the old (plainsong) and the new (a harmonic language appropriate to its time and place)—continues to cast its potent spell over performers and listeners alike. This new recording from Stephen Layton and his Trinity forces fully deserves to be regarded as ‘definitive’.

Duruflé’s father had been an architect and when working on the house belonging to Maurice Emmanuel, professor of the history of music at the Paris Conservatoire, mentioned that his seventeen-year-old son was an organist at the Church of Notre-Dame in Louviers. Emmanuel recommended lessons from Tournemire to prepare Duruflé for the entrance exam to the Conservatoire organ class in the autumn of 1920. But before taking the exam, the young Maurice came to feel Tournemire’s freewheeling approach was not what he wanted, and went instead to Vierne. As he later wrote: ‘To the same extent that Tournemire made one feel one was sitting upon a volcano about to erupt, Vierne gave one a sense of complete ease. He was always the same from one day to the next.’ Vierne was also much stricter than Tournemire over the formal shaping of improvisations, and in retrospect we could say that Duruflé was lucky in benefiting from these opposing approaches of freedom and discipline, which lie at the root of much of the finest art and are certainly to be discerned in his Requiem.

It could be that the idea of basing a Requiem on plainsong melodies indeed came initially from Tournemire, who as organist of Sainte-Clotilde rarely played set voluntaries, preferring to put on the desk the page of the Liber Usualis (the standard collection of plainsong chants) containing the chant for the day, and to improvise on it. Duruflé later remembered these occasions vividly: ‘Tournemire found in Sainte-Clotilde’s magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ the ideal instrument, one which responded wonderfully to his every wish, to the flights of his imagination—by turns poetic, picturesque, whimsical; then impetuous, tumultuous, wild; finally peaceful, mystical, blissful. He generally preferred blissful conclusions.’ The impact of these experiences can be readily felt in his own Requiem, in the similarly wide emotional range and in the blissful conclusion. ...

The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge
Stephen Layton, conductor

No biography found.

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