NDR Chor / Klaas Stok

Description

A requiem as theatre music? The German-Russian composer Alfred Schnittke had no problem with the idea, and wrote his Requiem in 1975 as incidental music for a production of Schiller’s Inquisition drama »Don Carlos«. Schnittke’s score is as dark in mood as the plot; the music is pensive, almost eerie in tone. Even the »Sanctus«, which the composer claimed came to him in a dream, opens pointedly in a minor key. And his Three Sacred Hymns must likewise have been a nocturnal product: a conductor had asked him to write them, and Schnittke handed the manuscript over to him the next morning. The works of Ton de Leeuws also resemble a daydream, inspired as they are by Oriental and Far Eastern sources.