Charles Hope

From Mozart’s Requiem

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Mozart's Requiem by Alberta Ballet
Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium
Thursday, March 27 - Saturday, March 29

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Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Mozart’s monumental Requiem is one of the most profound and moving choral works of all time. Many fantastic stories surround the piece, some true, some fictional. A sampling:

True: Mozart died before he was able to finish it. If you’re dating a musicologist and the conversation lags, ask them, “How much of Mozart’s Requiem is actually Franz Süssmayr’s work?” Make sure you refresh your drink first.

False: Antonio Salieri did not poison Mozart in order to steal credit for the Requiem, although that idea served well as the premise for plays by Pushkin and Peter Schaffer, as well as the Oscar-winning film Amadeus.

Unproven: Mozart experienced a premonition of his own death, and was writing music for his own funeral.

Alberta Ballet and Edmonton Opera are collaborating on an audacious production of Mozart’s Requiem. More than 125 performers will be onstage, including dancers, vocal and instrumental soloists and the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Peter Dala.

For hundreds of years, composers have been writing requiem masses to commemorate the departed. The traditional liturgical text is “a plea for redemption, for forgiveness, to be able to go to paradise,” according to Alberta Ballet’s artistic director, Jean Grand-Maître.

After searching for a personal entry point into Mozart’s Requiem, Grand-Maître says, “What really stuck to me was the idea of creating a prayer for all the people who are suffering in the wars today, this ongoing human aggression that seems to be eternal. I’d like to dedicate this requiem as a prayer for the people dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, as much the civilians as the soldiers.”

While many of the tableaus he has choreographed will depict profound suffering, others are more hopeful. Jonathan Ollivier, who will dance the role of an angel, says the ballet also addresses death’s inevitable role in the cycle of life. “(Dancer) Laëtitia Clément is six months pregnant, and she’s going to be in the production, showing there’s life as well. It’s not all war and death, there’s also life that comes into the world. Quite a few of the pieces are almost an awakening, and (others are) so dark and heavy. That’s what will be so wonderful about the production, having that light and shade incorporated in the ballet.”

Ollivier is excited about the staging of the show. “All the singers will be above and around us onstage as well, so we should get a really nice kind of energy from them, and from the live orchestra as well.” The four vocal soloists, and more than 100 chorus members, will be uniquely positioned upstage, in a vast wall that also serves as a surface for image projection.

The first half of the program will include a performance of Shostakovich’s uncharacteristically upbeat Piano Concerto No. 2, choreographed by Alberta Ballet’s ballet master, Edmund Stripe. B.C. pianist Kinza Tyrell will be the featured soloist.

Another emerging star from Western Canada, Edmonton native Angela Welch, will open the program with Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate. This joyful, effervescent “mini-concerto” for soprano was written when Mozart was only 17, and serves as a perfect contrast to the mature, sombre music and subject matter of the Requiem.

Grand-Maître was reminded how art and mortality are intimately entwined during a performance last season. “I remember when we were doing Cinderella in Edmonton. There’s a children’s hospital next door (to the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium). There were two little girls there who were dying of cancer, aged maybe 12 and six, and they wanted to see Cinderella. So it was easy to wheel them across the parking lot and into the theatre. The dancers knew that they would be there, and it really changed the entire interpretation that night, because they wanted to give these children something so beautiful before they died. It was an extraordinary moment that makes you realize how much art is an antidote to suffering.”