Music: Buffo Requiem

Domenico Cimarosa was a fast and witty writer of Italian opera who cranked out some 65 works in a comparatively short lifetime (he died at 51). The only one that survives is No. 49—a comic opera titled ll Matrimonio Segreto, which pleased Austria’s Emperor Leopold II so much at the premiere that he demanded a repeat of the entire score as an encore. Last week Manhattan concertgoers turned out to sample another side of Cimarosa’s musical personality. The occasion: the first known public performance of a requiem Mass written by Cimarosa in Russia in 1788 and since then stored away in a private collection in Florence.

The Requiem proved to be a long, elaborately orchestrated work, so sprightly that it seemed better suited to a festival than a funeral. The choral parts suggest passion rather than piety; the orchestra skips and trips along with a fine comic invention. The work is at its most exuberant in the solo parts, which are as warmly melodic as the love songs of Italian street singers. Many an Italian requiem, including Verdi’s, is shot through with operatic overtones, but Cimarosa’s work verges on opera so closely that it requires only the substitution of a bedroom plot to move intact to the stage. Not a major work, it was nevertheless a musical find that richly deserved a hearing.

The credit for digging it up belongs to Conductor-Musicologist Newell Jenkins. 43, who has long had a passion for unearthing little-known works of the 18th century. Last season Jenkins launched a series of what he called Clarion Concerts at which he presented the fruits of a dusty three-year search through the libraries and conservatories of Europe. To Jenkins’ own surprise, Clarion Concerts was a rousing success at the box office. Before Jenkins gets through, his subscription audience will have encountered such obscure 18th century composers as Franz Anton Rossler, The Chevalier de Saint-George and Francesco Antonio Bonporti. In the concert-hall business, a line-up like that is equivalent to a Las Vegas chorus line composed entirely of suburban matrons.