Tigran Mansurian - Requiem album review: Genocide’s delicate balancing act

After putting aside three abortive attempts, Tigran Mansurian completed his Requiem, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Armenian genocide, in 2011.

His problem was to reconcile Christian approaches from East and West. There is in the finished work a resignation and an acceptance of fate, expressed using much sparer musical means than are normally associated with requiems. There is lots of monody, both choral and from the two soloists, Anja Petersen and Andrew Redmond. That's not to say that the temperature does not rise from time to time, but the Dies irae is just 2½ minutes long, and the Tuba mirum quickly reasserts the prevailing mood.

A strangely compelling work. url.ie/kh67