Verdi: Requiem / Quattro Pezzi Sacri (Four Sacred Pieces)
This religious masterpiece, composed in memory of the great Italian  novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), has  themes even more cosmic than any  in Verdi's other operas: life and death, heaven and hell, the Christian vision  of humanity's redemption, the end of the world, and the last judgment. Verdi's  music rises to the tremendous demands of this subject matter; it is music of  grandeur, guilt, terror, and consolation, with a breadth of vision and an  intensity of feeling unique in the composer's work and in religious music. John  Eliot Gardiner's is the first recording made with period instruments, a kind of  performance that some musiclovers still dismiss as dilettantism, more concerned  with musicological correctness than feeling and communication. Gardiner's  powerful performance blows such objections away, and this recording takes a  rightful place alongside the best modern instrument versions.--Joe  McLellan