Giuseppi Verdi: Manzoni Requiem.  Renee Fleming, soprano; Olga Borodina,
mezzo soprano; Andrea Bocelli, tenor; Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, bass.  Kirov
Orchestra and Chorus, Valery Gergiev, conductor.  Philips 468079.

This project should cost some record label executives their jobs.  Billed
on its cover as "The Ultimate Verdi Requiem," this disaster of a recording
must surely have Verdi spinning in his grave.  There are so many things
wrong with the performance that it will be necessary to break the problems
down into categories to describe them adequately.

On the face of it, this should be a great performance.  Philips have had
great success in the world of opera with Mr. Gergiev and his Kirov forces.
Couple this with a line-up of superstar soloists and a crack recording
team, we should have a pot of gold.  Instead, we have a pile of dung.

The problems start with the superstars.  As individuals, Fleming, Borodina
and D'Arcangelo deliver some fine singing.  Borodina's Liber scriptus is
simply ravishing, and Fleming soars in the Libera me.  D'arcangelo's
Confutatis is powerful and puts the requisite fear of God into the
listener.  The troubles begin though with the first Kyrie from would-be
tenor Andrea Bocelli.  Completely out-classed by both the music and his
colleagues, Bocelli delivers reed-thin, strained and under pitched singing
from the get-go.  His solo passages are rife with tension as he croons and
scoops his way thorough a forest of mispronounced words.  Incapable of the
vocal demands of the score, Bocelli's Ingemisco is nothing short of painful
to hear.  Every note above the staff is an epic struggle and Mr. Bocelli
is defeated at every attempt.  Dull and slow, Bocelli projects no urgency
or passion, and his tempo dragging is maddening.  That Philips and Decca
continue to pass off this second rate pop star as the heir apparent to
opera tenordom is nothing less than fraud.

As an ensemble, our quartet is poorly matched and the balance between
them is non-existent.  Any hope of a pleasant sound from the foursome is
dashed by Bocelli's obvious inability to hold his own against the superior
technique of his colleagues.  The Salva me,which in the hands of Sir Georg
Solti and Sutherland, Horne, Pavarotti and Talvela was so ravishingly
gorgeous is now barely short of hideous.

On to the chorus.  Gergiev pushes the choir into storms of shouting
reminiscent of a medieval battlefield.  So overblown are their screams
that texts are unintelligible, and the women, though wailing like banshees,
are barely heard above the warriors in the tenor and bass sections.  The
orchestra is so over-miked that the stentorian bass drum in the opening of
the Dies irae sounds more like a Howitzer than an instrument.  There is no
finesse the singing, and the deep emotional content that Verdi so
masterfully wrote into the score gives way to pure bombast.

As for the recording and presentation, this too is a travesty.  Dynamic
levels are so extreme that one cannot listen without one hand on the volume
control.  The loud choral passages sound distorted and out of proportion.
To their credit, the Kirov orchestra brass gives a couple of wonderful
thrills at the beginning of the Tuba mirum.

The accompanying booklet is a joke.  Photos of the soloists with quotes
of them extolling Gergiev start things off.  The program notes say little
to nothing about the music that is of any use.  Rather, we get Gergiev's
empty-headed commentary, which has all the literary merit of a post-match
interview with a professional wrestler.  This "ultimate requiem" belongs on
the scrap heap of misdirected commercial hype.  Expensive projects such as
this one erase any sympathy one might have for the struggling classical
recording industry.  If they turn out this kind of rubbish, they deserve
what they get.  What a waste.

Kevin Sutton