Requiem in C minor - Cherubini

Transitus animae - Perosi

Sunday's choral concert at the Wexford Festival presented a pleasing juxtaposition of the familiar and the obscure. Cherubini's Requiem in Cminor is one of the finest achievements of the Italian who held such sway in Paris for most of his long musical life. No less a figure than Beethoven declared that if he were to write a requiem, Cherubini's in C minor would be his only model.

Lorenzo Perosi (1872-1956), long-time music director of the Sistine Chapel (from 1898) was famous enough in his heyday for three of his oratorios to have been performed at the London Musical Festival of 1899. His Transitus animae (1907), with a Gerontius-like subject of a soul (mezzo soprano) in the throes of death, has an intriguing mix of austerity and lush, post-Gounod sweetness, well worth hearing as an illumination of a stylistic blend now long forgotten.

Daniela Barcellona was the fervent soloist and choir and orchestra under Maurizio Benini charted the heavenward path with the same unfailing illumination they had brought to the masterly solemnity of the great requiem by Cherubini.