By the time the final chords of Mozart’s Requiem faded into the lights of the Chan Centre on August 7, the audience was already on its feet. The standing ovation was an acknowledgement of a performance that balanced precision with emotional gravity and of a summer festival that had given Vancouver a sustained feast of historically informed music-making.
Founded in 1970, Early Music Vancouver (EMV) has grown from a small collective of enthusiasts into one of the city’s most distinctive cultural institutions. Its mission is deceptively simple: to perform early music — usually defined as encompassing medieval and renaissance music — in a way that is faithful to the original composers. In practice, this means gut strings instead of steel, natural horns instead of modern brass and an approach to phrasing and ornamentation that draws on both scholarship and intuition. The result is vivid and immediate music that feels as though it is being made for the first time, even when the score is centuries old.
This year’s closing concert, Mozart’s Requiem, marked the first time EMV has programmed the work. It is one of the most mythologized pieces in the classical canon — left incomplete at the composer’s death in 1791, the Requiem has inspired generations of completions. Composers pick up where the original left over, attempting to end the piece in a cohesive way. This performance used a fresh 2024 completion by English conductor and composer Howard Arman, a version that maintains the structural clarity of the familiar Sussmayr finish — the Requiem’s standard completion — while introducing subtle shifts in orchestration and balance. The result was neither museum restoration nor modernist overhaul, but a reading that allowed long-heard phrases to emerge with new inflections.
EMV artistic director Alexander Weimann led the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, arranged in a sweeping podium that set the winds and brass in vivid dialogue with the strings. Alongside, the Vancouver Cantata Singers brought an immediate force to the Introitus — the Requiem’s opening section. Their sound carried both light and weight: basses grounding the texture with resonant depth, while sopranos traced bright, ascending lines that seemed to lift toward the hall’s high wooden arches.
The four soloists — Magali Simard-Galdès (soprano), Emma Parkinson (alto), Jacob Perry (tenor) and Drew Santini (baritone) — were well matched in blend and temperament, particularly in the Benedictus, where their phrases seemed to pass like light across water. Simard-Galdès brought an unforced clarity to the Recordare, her tone tinged with a silvery edge that carried easily over the orchestra. Parkinson’s alto was warm but not heavy, lending a grounded centre to ensemble passages. Perry’s tenor had a lyrical brightness, while Santini’s baritone offered a steady, articulate anchor – most moving in the Tuba mirum, where the dialogue with the trombone unfolded like a revelation.
The Pacific Baroque Orchestra, performing on period instruments, shaped the familiar sequences with supple articulation. In the Dies irae, the timpani strikes were firm but never overbearing, and the trumpets, a natural timbre rather than the piercing brilliance of modern brass, gave the movement a burnished heat rather than a blinding glare. The Lacrimosa, perhaps the work’s most famous section, avoided sentimentality; Weimann kept the tempo flowing, allowing the harmonic suspensions to ache and release without sagging into overindulgence.
There were moments where the balance between chorus and orchestra tilted, particularly in the more densely scored passages of the Confutatis, where the strings occasionally submerged the men’s voices. But these were minor adjustments in an otherwise carefully proportioned performance. What stood out most was the concert’s sense of trajectory – not just a transition from one movement to the next, but an unfolding journey from the grounded weight of the opening to the almost weightless transparency of the Lux aeterna.
The Chan Centre, with its warm resonance and natural acoustic bloom, proved an ideal setting for this kind of performance. From the audience’s vantage point, the interplay of sound and space became part of the drama – the quicksilver decay of pizzicato bass notes, the way a single oboe line seemed to hover for an extra beat before dissolving. Even in the most forceful choral climaxes, there was room for detail.
By the final Communio, it was clear that this Requiem had achieved something rare. It had reanimated a piece so often freighted with expectation, allowing it to speak in a fresh and immediate voice. The final sustained “Amen” did not so much end as vanish upward, and for a long moment, the hall held its breath. Then the applause broke — a rising tide, joined quickly by the standing ovation.
As the musicians bowed, there were no solemn faces. Smiles — broad, unguarded, almost giddy — passed between players, singers and audience alike. For all its themes of mortality, this Requiem felt less like a meditation on endings, but rather a celebration of what music, in the right hands, can do: transform grief into shared, luminous joy.
If the summer festival’s earlier concerts had been steps in a well-planned journey, this closing night was a summit — one that left the audience not in darkness, but in light. The EMV has long built its reputation on rethinking the past; with this debut of Mozart’s Requiem, they have shown that even the most familiar monuments can, under the right care, be made to live again.
