There was much surprise in 1985 when Andrew Lloyd Webber presented his Requiem to the public. Although classical musicians had repeatedly entured into the spheres of the “light muse”, hardly any path led the other way – from musicals or operettas to the sublime heights of sacred music.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is world-famous as the composer of the musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, but his Requiem has also achieved international acclaim. Winner of a Grammy Award, this grand-sounding masterpiece of contemporary classical music, written in 1985, is dedicated to the memory of Webber's late father. The recording of a concert by the Münchner Rundfunkorchester on June 15, 2023, a tribute to the British composer who celebrated his 75th birthday in March 2023, is now presented by BR-KLASSIK. This live recording from the Herz-Jesu Church in Munich features the Bavarian Radio Chorus accompanied by a select ensemble of soloists, under the baton of principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn. As Requiem Masses had been abolished in Anglican England since the Reformation, the composer did not have to consider liturgical functionality or ecclesiastical suitability. Verdi had demonstrated that the texts of the Latin Requiem Mass provided an excellent model for grand opera. And Lloyd Webber found inspiration for the lyrical dimension with hit potential in composers such as Gabriel Fauré. The texts of the Requiem were rearranged with a sense of dramaturgy. The repeated insertion of the pithy lines "Requiem aeternam" and "Dies irae" gave them a fundamental, leitmotif-like character. The theatrical potential of the sequence ("Dies irae") was expanded, as it had been with Verdi, into a kaleidoscope of human emotions in the face of death and the Last Judgement. Lloyd Webber's Requiem had its world premiere on February 24, 1985 at St. Thomas Church, New York, with tenor Plácido Domingo, crossover soprano Sarah Brightman (Lloyd Webber's wife at the time), and boy soprano Paul Miles-Kingston, under the baton of Lorin Maazel.
