Symphony Review: Lowe delivers Verdi’s Requiem with exceptional balance

As we approach the end of the 2025-26 season of the Spokane Symphony, the orchestra’s conductor and music director, James Lowe, has decided to go to his big guns and offer one of the most thrilling and impressive works in the symphonic repertoire: Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, or, to give its full title, “Messa da Requiem,” composed in memory of Alessandro Manzoni in 1873.

The forces necessary for the performance of this great work filled the stage of the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox this weekend. To begin with, of course, there was the Spokane Symphony Orchestra, augmented with extra winds, brass and percussion, the Spokane Symphony Chorale, prepared by its director, Meg Stohlman, and four stellar soloists: Caroline Coralles, soprano; Linda Baird, mezzo-soprano; Adam Diegel, tenor; and Mark Walters, bass.

Corralles and Baird were making their first appearances with our orchestra; one can only hope they will return before long. Corralles is an authentic “Verdi Soprano,” possessing a full range of color and power throughout the soprano range. She was both a commanding soloist and a thoughtful and attentive colleague in the many passages of ensemble singing Verdi provides in this piece. There were, in fact, some passages, such as in the early Kyrie eleison, when Corralles was perhaps too commanding, which made what should have been a plea to God sound more like a demand. This may have been the result, however, of a need to accommodate a very powerful instrument to an acoustically very live space, such as we have at the Fox. The gorgeous duet with Baird in the “Recordare” could not have been more exquisitely balanced, and her rendition of the rapturous “Libera Me,” which concludes the Requiem, was beautifully proportioned and as moving as Verdi could have wished.

Baird’s silken mezzo is as capable of stern declamation, as in the “Liber scriptus,”and tender supplication, as in the “Lachrymosa,” in which she managed both to blend perfectly with the chorus and other soloists, while at the same time pointedly projecting the deep melancholy of the text.

Returning to the Fox were Diegel and Walters, both of whom appeared in the last performance in Spokane of the Verdi Requiem in May 2017. Time appears to have left Diegel’s ringing tenor wholly untouched. It possessed a decidedly youthful ring in the opening Kyrie, and never lost it. The very famous passage for tenor (it would be wrong to think of it as an aria, though some tenors have done so), the Ingemisco, was very beautifully sung, though Diegel’s vigorous, heroic tone was not quite in keeping with the sense of the text: “I groan as a guilty one, / and my face blushes with guilt.” Verdi is extremely meticulous and deliberate in his setting of the text in the Requiem, demanding close attention to verbal nuance of the performer.

This demand was more than satisfied by bass Walters, whose reading of his part in this piece was exceptionally nuanced and expressive, as one might expect from a singer who delivered such a memorable portrayal of the tragic title character in Verdi’s Rigoletto when he took that role with the Coeur d’Alene Opera in 2013. His calm, sculpted approach to the “Bass passage at Mors stupebit et natura” (“Death and nature shall stand amazed”) was much more chilling than the stern, declamative approach that is more common at this point, though less artistic. When Verdi does call for the bass to employ the full strength and color of his voice, as in the deeply compelling “Rex tremendae majestatis” (“King of dreadful majesty”), Walter showed that he had ample quantities of both in reserve.

Because the composition highlights the human emotional content of the Catholic rite for the dead, rather than elements of solemnity and resignation, it is often archly described as an opera in ecclesiastical dress. In every significant sense, this is incorrect, but one of the most important differences to acknowledge between what Verdi does in the Requiem and what we find in his earlier operas (Otello and Falstaff came later, and are more similar) is the absolute equality of its three musical elements: orchestra, chorus and soloists. The choral writing is as dramatically vivid, as vital to the composition and as difficult to master as are the orchestral and solo passages. In these performances, the always excellent Spokane Symphony Chorale surpassed even the benchmark it set in Sergei Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky” in 2014 in the clarity and vividness of character it imparted to the text … in Latin no less!

Composer Ildebrando Pizzetti insightfully described the opening to Verdi’s Requiem as “like the murmur of an invisible crowd,” evoking the Dantesque image of a gathering of unseen souls seeking a place in Charon’s boat across the River Styx. Before giving the downbeat to begin the Requiem, Lowe conspicuously waited until the entire auditorium was dead still. He wished to make it clear, it seemed, that we were moving into a different sphere of existence, one populated by our most fervent hopes and deepest fears, rather than by the petty nuisances and pretenses that rule our daily lives. Only when total silence had been secured did the cellos and then the violins begin, with the utmost delicacy, to play the descending three-note figure to which then, like the murmur of an invisible crowd, the chorus attached the word “requiem.”

The Symphony Chorale contributed just this sort of dramatic vitality throughout the performance, whether in the desperate insistence with which it repeated “Salva me,”(“Save me!”) or the dancing clarity it achieved in the midst of Verdi’s thorniest writing in the Sanctus.

The orchestra is no less central, no more a medium of mere “accompaniment” than the chorus or soloists in the Requiem. The complexity, virtuosity and dramatic expressivity that Verdi asks of the orchestra in this work is unprecedented in any of his earlier works. That virtuosity was not long in coming, with the dramatic “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”) section, in which Verdi evokes the punishing turmoil facing the souls on the Day of Judgment. The terror which Michelangelo captures so successfully on the wall of the Sistine Chapel is plainly what Verdi meant to convey through the medium of thundering percussion, ricocheting brass and whirling figures in the strings quite vividly convey a sense of swirling descent into the maelstrom of hell, providing all of these elements are clearly audible and perfectly coordinated as they were in the performance we heard.

“Balance” is surely not the sexiest term of praise to shower on a conductor, but that is a linguistic problem, not a musical one. Maintaining a balance within and between the performing forces of the Verdi Requiem is not easy; neither is it optional, if the performance is to have any chance of success. Conveying the drama of a supplicant soul before the awesome power of God as Verdi envisioned it requires that we be able to hear everything that Verdi wrote down. And that requires a conductor who knows all of what is written down and knows also how to employ the talents of roughly 300 people to transform those thousands of instructions into the emotional impact on the audience that the composer hoped for. That is the kind of balance James Lowe achieved in Saturday’s performance of the Verdi Requiem. A storm of grateful applause – from the stage as well as from the auditorium – testified to his success.