Requiem for America review – Brent Michael Davids gives the invisible a voice in his urgent new work | Classical music
Amid the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of US independence, Brent Michael Davids’ Requiem for America brings an abrupt and necessary shift of perspective. Subtitled “Singing for the Invisible People”, it tells of the colonisation of North America and the systematic erasure of its Indigenous people. We don’t hear the text of the Latin mass; instead Davids, a composer of Mohican heritage, has constructed a patchwork of first-hand sources: newspaper articles, military reports, telegrams, rare accounts from the survivors of massacres. It is, as Davids describes it, both a reckoning and a remembrance: it’s meant to be shocking, and it is. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this premiere should have happened outside the US; nonetheless, a further performance is planned for Boston in November, of an even longer version. Here a lot was packed into 90 minutes by a stageful of musicians: the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, an eight-strong Native American choir, four vocal soloists as if for a traditional setting of the Requiem – and, to the conductor Teddy Abrams’s right, the mezzo-soprano …
