Berlioz: Requiem

If you remember Valery Gergiev's LSO Live recording of Mahler's Eighth Symphony made in St Paul's Cathedral, you may experience a certain trepidation at the prospect of another recording in that extraordinarily swimmy acoustic. But, in hands as sensitive as Colin Davis's, Berlioz's 1837 Grand Messe des morts , conceived to fill every nook and cranny of the Église Saint-Louis des Invalides in Paris with sound, actually thrives on the vastness, at least as captured by the microphone. There are, to be sure, a few moments when performers lose touch with each other, but they almost serve to authenticate the sheer scale of the undertaking. The capable Barry Banks is the high-lying tenor in the Sanctus .