Salonen Conducts Verdi’s Requiem

Crude as a gut punch, tender as a kiss, Verdi’s Requiem translates the ancient Latin mass for the dead into the vivid and visceral idiom of Italian opera, bringing divine scripture to the streets, and vice versa. The conductor Hans von Bülow dismissed the Requiem as Verdi’s “latest opera, in ecclesiastical vestments,” but his friend Johannes Brahms disagreed: “Only a genius could have written such a work.