Featured Album March 2025: Pygmalion "Mozart: Requiem"

Returning for their second Featured Album from The Early Music Shop, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion released their recording of Mozart's iconic Requiem last autumn via Harmonia Mundi. Renowned for their interpretations of big works from the world of early music, Pygmalion once again present a top-class performance which sits towards the very end of the period we cover in our catalogue. Read on to find out more...

Mozart: Requiem
Pygmalion & Raphaël Pichon

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR MARCH 2025

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From the artist's press release:

The sublime reflection of a human being facing the end of life and what comes afterwards, Mozart’s Requiem reaches beyond the realm of music to attain universal resonance.The sublime reflection of a human being facing the end of life and what comes afterwards, Mozart’s Requiem reaches beyond the realm of music to attain universal resonance. Raphaël Pichon’s interpretation of this testamentary work, nurtured by a seminal experience with stage director Romeo Castellucci and punctuated by earlier sacred pieces of Mozart, is overwhelmingly moving.’s interpretation of this testamentary work, nurtured by a seminal experience with stage director Romeo Castellucci and punctuated by earlier sacred pieces of Mozart, is overwhelmingly moving.

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Mozart: Requiem":

Mozart’s final work, his Requiem, has acquired legendary status. Peter Shaffer’s play and film Amadeus have added several false, even sensational layers, to the circumstances surrounding the work’s commission and composition which have entered the popular imagination. But wherever the truth lies, it remains clear that the Requiem was a significant composition for Mozart, one that was universal in its appeal with its mix of the sacred (plainsong, Catholic liturgy) with the secular (operatic quartets). Its home key of D minor makes links with other Mozart works: the Commendatore’s chilling music from Don Giovanni, for example, and the Queen of Night’s realm in The Magic Flute, the latter composed only a few months before the Requiem.

When Mozart died in 1791 the Requiem manuscript lay unfinished on his desk. The task of completing it was gifted by his widow Constanze to his pupil, Franz Xavier Süssmayer, who was in any case assisting the composer as he lay on his deathbed. It is this version of the Requiem that has held its place in the repertoire for over 200 years, despite several more recent attempts to rework Mozart’s sketches. Whatever the deficiencies of Süssmayer’s version, he was at least there in Vienna in 1791 working alongside Mozart.

This excellent new recording from Raphaël Pichon’s Pygmalion is based on a staged interpretation of the Requiem for which Pichon expanded Süssmayer’s familiar text by interpolating earlier, short sacred pieces by Mozart. It makes for a fascinating sequence. Perhaps most arresting of all of Pichon’s choices is the inclusion of the brief, incomplete Amen fugue at the end of the Lacrimosa, which stops, as it were, in mid-air. Bookended by the plainchant ‘In paradisum’ sung by a boy treble, the musical sequence unfolds as a philosophical contemplation of human mortality. The performance is outstanding, with transparent vocal lines in even the most complex contrapuntal movements, and stylish instrumental playing. This latest addition to the Pygmalion discography joins the French group’s recent treasured accounts of the Bach Motets and St Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers (the subject of a previous Featured Album blog).

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Mozart: Requiem is available from The Early Music Shop online or in our Snape Maltings showroom.

Click here to order now!

Click below to watch Pichon conduct an extract of Mozart's Requiem 'Lacrimosa' during the album recording sessions: