For a while, it looked as if American composer Christopher Rouse's large-scale Requiem might never see the light of day.
"There have literally been at least 10 different performances scheduled, and all have gone the way of the dodo," Rouse said recently from his home in Baltimore. "Music directors are very enthusiastic and commit to it, then show it to their chorus masters who -- when they regain consciousness -- say, 'No, I don't think so.' "
Among the conductors who hoped to premiere the work but proved unable to were Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and Christoph Eschenbach. Things changed, though, when Grant Gershon, music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, got involved.
"After seeing the first page of the score, I was hooked," Gershon said. "I was stunned by what he was going after. The more time I spent on the score, the more I became convinced it was an overwhelming masterpiece.
"Then I learned that if we programmed it in Los Angeles, it would be in fact the world premiere. That iced it."
The Requiem, which is to receive its belated first performance Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, was commissioned to commemorate the 2003 bicentenary of composer Hector Berlioz by Soli Deo Gloria, a Chicago-based organization founded to promote classical sacred music by conductor John Nelson.
Nelson and Rouse, both of whom plan to attend the premiere, are also both Berlioz fans -- although "fanatics" might be the better word.
"Of all the composers, he's the one I feel closest to spiritually," Rouse said. "I almost feel I wrote his music myself sometimes, it speaks so closely to me. He was a crazy, wild guy with a stroke of classicism, a mixture of tradition and innovation."
It was Nelson's idea that Rouse write a Requiem -- a funeral Mass -- just as Berlioz had. "Had they asked for a Te Deum or a setting of the Mass or whatnot, I would have written that," said Rouse, 58, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (in 1993, for his Trombone Concerto) and a Grammy Award (in 2002, for "Concert de Gaudi for Guitar and Orchestra").
"I didn't set out to write a piece that was that hard, thinking, 'This is going to make them sweat,' " he said. "I always think about music as a communicative art. I threw myself into this in a way I never have done with anything else. I think it's the best thing I'm capable of writing."
So what makes it so hard?
