A sublime, baroque look at the requiem on Fancy Music. From the label’s Bandcamp site:
“Requiem (from Latin requies – “rest”) is a high genre of concert sacred music, a kind of mourning oratorio.
Even the above phrase is little understood by the general public, not to mention the names and meaning of the Latin psalms of the canonical Requiem. As for people who are knowledgeable, for example by virtue of belonging to the Catholic Church of the Latin rite, even for them, I am sure, these texts are devoid of the burning apocalyptic meaning with which they were filled for a person in the Baroque era or in earlier times.
The same is true of the Orthodox analogs of the requiem Mass. Due to its archaic nature, for a person who has not been involved since childhood in the scope, sound and meaning of the Church Slavonic language, the text is often simply incomprehensible, and if understood, then, with few exceptions, it is perceived formally, as some template phrases and its perception is deprived of the relevance of involvement with the human feeling of loss and prayerful ecstasy, except when a person is personally confronted with such a loss.”
