“Tenderness is invincible,” as the saying goes. Fauré’s Requiem, arguably his most masterful work, comforts the bereaved and pays tribute to the victims of the pandemic. The Chariot Jubilee, written by Canadian African-American Nathaniel Dett, celebrates Black lives through music.
Fauré considered death “a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than a painful experience,” a conviction embodied in his peaceful Requiem. Precise and luminous, the work uses timbre and instruments with restraint, paying tribute to their sound, their voice, and lifting the souls of the living as well as the departed. With the rich and vivid voice of soprano Suzanne Taffot, Nathaniel Dett’s The Chariot Jubilee evokes gospel classics with the expressivity of late Romanticism.
