Requiem as a dream.

Byline: FRED CRAFTS The Register-Guard

WHEN DIANE Retallack says her Eugene Concert Choir's performance of Hector Berlioz's Requiem will be big, she means gigantic. Monumental. Spectacular. Overwhelming. Impressive.

With a chorus numbering 180 and a 100-piece orchestra, the concert will be, Retallack promises, "an event."

"It is huge in scope," Retallack says, beaming. "It is the largest, most ambitious work the concert choir has ever approached in our 27-year history."

Berlioz's Requiem is a prime example of musical thunder. To realize the Apocalypse, the composer demanded four flutes, two oboes, two English horns, four clarinets, eight bassoons, 12 horns, four cornets, four tubas, 50 violins, 20 violas, 20 cellos and 18 double basses.

The percussion section has eight pairs of timpani, a bass drum, 10 pairs of cymbals and four tam-tams (large Asian gongs).

And if that weren't enough, Berlioz also called for a brass choir (four trumpets, four trombones and four tubas) to be placed in each of the hall's four corners. As a result, the Oregon Mozart Players chamber orchestra is being expanded to 100 musicians, about three times the usual complement.

For the chorus, Berlioz asked for 80 women's voices, 60 tenors and 70 basses. The French composer even suggested once that "if space permits, the chorus may be doubled or tripled and the orchestra proportionally increased."

The Eugene Concert Choir has been bulked up to 100 voices, and will be joined by the 80-voice David York Ensemble of Portland.

Muse and music

Curiously, for all the noise the Requiem has made over the centuries, it most likely would have vanished into obscurity had its composer not doggedly pushed for its premiere in 1837 - six years after he conceived it.

Berlioz's journey began in March 1831, when he arrived in Rome after winning France's prestigious Prix de Rome. One of the first places he stopped was St. Peter's Basilica (`Sublime, overpowering!'), where he began to imagine music that could rival its architectural and artistic wonders.

His creative juices flowing, Berlioz went on to envision music that would fill the Sistine Chapel with sounds matching Michelangelo's fresco, `The Last Judgment.'

Over the ensuing years, he turned the idea over and over in his mind, first as an oratorio and later as an opera. When the project finally was commissioned, he already was well on his way.

"The text ... was a quarry that I had long coveted," Berlioz wrote. "Now, at last, it was mine, and I fell upon it with a kind of fury.

`My brain felt as though it would explode with the pressure of ideas. The outline of one piece was barely sketched before the next formed itself in my mind.

`It was impossible to write fast enough, and I devised a sort of musical shorthand that was a great help to me."

The opportunity to actually compose the piece came when the government commissioned a "Grand Mass for the Dead" for the slain heroes of the Revolution of 1830. The event was to be marked in the domed Chapel of St. Louis, within the Hotel (Hospital) des Invalides in Paris.

Berlioz had extracted the commission from the departing minister of the interior, the Comte de Gasparin, who viewed it as his "musical testament." However, critics of the outspoken Berlioz protested so strongly to the director of fine arts that he delayed paying the composer's commission.

Meanwhile, Berlioz was composing like mad. With the ceremony only four months away, he needed to move fast.

But his opponents weren't done, yet. Rehearsals actually were under way when they extracted an order canceling the musical portion of the memorial service.

Wounded, Berlioz kept lobbying for a performance of his music. It finally came in October 1837, when General Damremont was killed during a French victory in Algeria.

By this time, the director of fine arts, tired of Berlioz's harangues, arranged to have the work performed at the general's state funeral. And he had Berlioz paid.

The lavish funeral service was held in Les Invalides on Dec. 5, 1837, with the royal family and a large number of government officials, nobility and mourners on hand. The windows were covered and the walls draped in black; some 600 candles flickered around the coffin, and another 4,000 candles were set about the chapel.

Although the Requiem had been written as a concert piece, it was broken into sections for the church service. Berlioz wanted to conduct it himself, but the job went to opera conductor Francois Habeneck.

At the key moment in the "Dies Irae," when the four brass choirs enter at a new tempo, Habeneck set down his baton and started to take a pinch of snuff. To save his piece from total collapse, Berlioz ran out of the audience, jumped onto the podium and conducted the section himself.

The work was a hit. Newspaper critics wrote rave reviews; the public loved it.

So did Berlioz himself, who later wrote: "If I were threatened with the destruction of everything I have created except for one work, I would beg mercy for the Requiem."

Far from funereal 

Retallack calls the Berlioz Requiem "a work that I am totally enamored with." She has sung it twice under the baton of the late Robert Shaw, once while doing her doctoral work at Indiana University in 1980, then 13 years later in a Carnegie Hall performance in New York City.

She says the notes Shaw gave her form the core of Retallack's interpretation.

"The Requiem is something extraordinary. No one had ever done anything like this before. We have these huge, enormous, grand moments with incredible emotion and incredible power, then we have the most delicate of chamber music.

`It's a Mass for the dead, but it's one of the most joyous pieces of music you will ever encounter."

For example, Retallack points to the "Lacrymosa" section.

"You think of the Mozart Requiems, for example, which are very somber, very heartwrenching. Well, Berlioz has chosen a tarantella. It's exuberant.

`There is a moment where the heavens part and you just know that salvation has come. We dance ourselves to a frenzy of joy and triumph over death."

The "Sanctus" is handled by a tenor soloist, in this case Glenn Siebert, who has sung with the Hamburg Oper, Santa Fe Opera, Washington Opera, Minnesota Opera, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Houston Symphony and Pittsburgh Symphony.

"He has a totally angelic voice, very high range," Retallack says. "It has to just float up there with a chorus of women who are obviously angels. We'll have the tenor in the balcony."

It doesn't take much coaxing to get Retallack to analyze the piece. But when she is done, she exclaims, "You have to live through this. You can hear it on a recording, but you can't really experience the piece that way.

`It really hits you viscerally."

Because of its power, Retallack is dedicating the concert to her father, Roy Johnson, who died Sept. 19, 2000, at the age of 77. A high school choral director in Joliet, Ill., Johnson also staged lavish school musicals.

"He was like the Mr. Holland of our area," his daughter says.

Asked why she picked this particular piece with which to memorialize her father, Retallack replies without hesitation: "It's one that's monumental enough for my dad."

Arts reporter Fred Crafts can be reached by phone at 338-2575 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

BERLIOZ REQUIEM

WHAT: Diane Retallack conducts the Eugene Concert Choir, David York Ensemble and Oregon Mozart Players

WHEN: 8 p.m.

Saturday

WHERE: Silva Hall, Hult Center, Seventh and Willamette streets

HOW MUCH: $12 to $24 through the Hult Center box office, 682-5000

GUARDLINE: To hear excerpts from the Berlioz Requiem, call GuardLine at 485-2000 from a touch-tone phone and request category 3733

CAPTION(S):

In addition to expanding the Eugene Concert Choir to 100 voices for the occasion, the 80-member David York Ensemble of Portland will raise its voices to perform the Hector Berlioz Requiem. Diane Retallack is dedicating the performance to her father.