Providing Consolation

I have to own up to a superstitious avoidance of requiems. I don't have Brahms, Verdi or Britten. I do have Mozart but only because it came one month as a free BBC music magazine cover disk. So this acquisition of Faure's Requiem is something of a first. Faure's approach is more to my taste, consolatory and resigned with the emphasis on peace and beauty with memorable melodies but staying on the right side of sentimentality. This performance by La Chapelle Royale and Ensemble Musique Oblique directed by Philippe Herreweghe uses modest forces and is all the better for it, with a kind of chamber like intimacy. The soloists, soprano Agnes Mellon and baritone Peter Kooy, are perfectly suited and the children of Les Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Louis charming but again without being saccharine. The other work on the disk complements the requiem well, it is a small mass composed as a joint venture by Faure and Messager for a local fishing village while on a relaxed holiday. Messe des Pecheurs de Villerville is for female voices, chamber orchestra and harmonium and inhabits the same sound world as that chosen by Herreweghe for the requiem, with similar forces used. Not in the same class as the requiem perhaps but not a throwaway either.