Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ leads Greenville Symphony into a season of ‘Common Ground’

The Greenville Symphony Orchestra will open its new season with one of classical music’s most familiar masterpieces — and two works by living composers that look at some of the same questions from very different perspectives.

Music Director Lee Mills will conduct Mozart’s “Requiem” as the centerpiece of the season-opening concert, which also features works by Anna Clyne and Caroline Shaw.

The program begins with Shaw’s “Entr’acte,” a work for strings inspired by Joseph Haydn’s string quartets. Shaw, an American composer, takes gestures that might seem to belong to the classical tradition and leads them in surprising contemporary directions.

Clyne’s “Sound and Fury,” meanwhile, draws its inspiration from the tumultuous world of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” The piece includes the Bard’s famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy from “Macbeth.”

Greenville poet Glenis Redmond. will recite the Shakespeare passage live during the Clyne work.

The three works may span more than two centuries, but Mills sees a common thread connecting them — fittingly enough for the orchestra’s theme this season: “Common Ground.”

“We’re exploring the things that unite all of us, across time and geographical location,” Mills said.

For this concert, that common ground is death, grief, mercy and redemption.

Clyne’s “Sound and Fury” approaches death through Shakespeare’s bleak meditation on the apparent pointlessness of life. Mozart’s “Requiem,” by contrast, explores judgment and salvation.

“Both the Mozart and the Anna Clyne are kind of both looking at this topic of death, really, from completely different lenses,” Mills said.

The contrast should make the Mozart especially powerful.

The orchestra will be joined by four soloists and a chorus of about 150 voices, including young singers from Clemson and Furman universities.

Vast range of emotion

Mills said Mozart’s “Requiem” belongs in the company of the great choral works of the classical repertoire, alongside pieces such as Verdi’s “Requiem” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Part of its enduring appeal, he said, is the remarkable range of emotions Mozart captures.

The famous “Dies irae” and “Confutatis” are forceful and even terrifying. The “Lacrimosa” is full of yearning. And the “Sanctus” and “Benedictus” offer consoling moments of soaring melodies and rich harmonies.

Mozart died while composing the “Requiem,” and the work was completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

“There’s this sort of mystery of Mozart dying while he wrote it,” Mills said. “I think it’s almost got a mythical status because of that.”

After more than two centuries, Mozart’s “Requiem” continues to ask the most universal questions, he said.