The musical director of Requiem for L. Fabrizio Cassol (a composer himself) brings together different musical cultures around a single theme. He looks for ways to write new stories from existing works. Fourteen musicians from across the world come together around Requiem, Mozart’s greatest but unfinished work. In reconstructing Requiem, the merge their own musical influences with some other genres, including jazz, opera and popular African music. On a theatrical level, the director Alain Platel and his ensemble look for a visual and physical translation of the images and their associations that Requiem conjures up: from the requiem mass to the mass grave into which Mozart was himself ‘dumped’.

Cassol and Platel find each other in this cultural mix and create a new universe. They have previously collaborated, for example, on Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin (vsprs), which won a prize at the Kontakt festival in 2007.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes (1 interval)

Photos by Chris Van der Burght