Raphaël Pichon’s Prom with his choir and period ensemble Pygmalion gave us an idiosyncratic version of Mozart’s Requiem that interleaved the movements of Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s familiar completion with shorter vocal and choral meditations on mortality from throughout Mozart’s life and career. Pichon, struck by thematic similarities between Mozart’s earliest motets and his final, unfinished masterpiece, calls his adaptation “a biographical journey of memories,” and his interpolations present us with pieces that are rarely heard, alongside familiar music in curiously unfamiliar guises.
So Mozart’s Meistermusik, an earlier choral version of the Masonic Funeral Music, now precedes the Requiem’s Introit, and the motet Quis Te Comprehendat, an anonymous arrangement of the adagio from the Gran Partita, is placed between Offertorium and Hostias. An aria from the relatively obscure Thamos, König in Ägypten (a play with incidental music) becomes a hellfire sermon prefacing the Dies irae, while the Agnus Dei is bracketed with the hymn O Gottes Lamm, which has something of the sublimity of Die Zauberflöte.
