The outstanding element in this performance is the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and Youth Choir, who have been admirably schooled by their director Robert Cooper. Berlioz’s Requiem is a work demanding at least as much intimacy as grandeur. The unaccompanied ‘Quaerens me’ is naturally a movement in which they come into their own, but throughout they sing with a beautiful, well-balanced timbre that has the clean, focused, even slightly cutting quality that ideally suits the music. They blend admirably with the notorious flute and trombone chords in the ‘Hostias’, and again with the excellent tenor soloist, Michael Schade, in the exchanges of the Sanctus. All of which makes it the more regrettable that the recording does them less than justice. Time and again, in the more dramatic movements, their light is hidden under a bushel of orchestral clamour. They vanish from time to time in the ‘Dies irae’ (especially at the ‘Tuba mirum’), in the ‘Lacrimosa’, and elsewhere when a better organized recording balance could have done them the justice they deserve.
Noel Edison’s performance is sensitive to the work’s nature, though he responds better to its quieter, more prayerful side than to the moments of high drama. The great climax of the ‘Dies irae’ is not built up to with the tension it needs, as Berlioz screws his keys ever higher to the moment when the brass bands should seem to open the firmament; nor is the ‘Lacrimosa’ as edgy as it might be in its snapping rhythms and searing phrases. There are also one or two odd departures from the text: the choir sings ‘Kyrie eleison’ sometimes when it should be the answering ‘Christe eleison’, and Berlioz’s carefully slurred phrasing of the violins in the ‘Rex tremendae’, which has a point, is ignored in favour of staccato playing. These are details: more important is the proper sense of a great ritual which gathers up these huge forces. There are some 15 other versions of the work listed on the Gramophone Database, including those by more famous names which do not come as close to the work as this performance does. The recently-issued Beecham version is in a category of its own; of the others, there is the first of Sir Colin Davis’s two, with the LSO – a vintage performance. But with the above reservations, the new version can certainly be commended.'