Honeck pre-concert chat - Mozart Requiem

John Lithgow in the post-concert chat:


> 'The Requiem Mass was a thing of great and terrible beauty.'

It was and is a thing of great beauty. I've heard the Requiem before, but I have to say, that this time somehow I heard it with much more clarity. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Mendelssohn Choir and Heinz Hall account for much of that. And now, with this first experience with a live concert of the Requiem, I find that much of it was simply brilliant musically, it was pleasing to my ear, and I found it eminently joyous, with little hint of sadness. It was only those haunting notes near the end that seemed to allude to the kind of emotion perhaps associated with death and loss. The genius of Mozart is the overwhelming sense of emotion that is invoked by such simple musical phrasing, and an enormous wealth of classical development.