Almost half a century ago, a well-mannered whirlwind hit the London concert scene. This humane hurricane was called Carlo Maria Giulini and he was already known to discerning British music lovers, especially opera-goers. But his interpretation of the Verdi Requiem, at the Royal Festival Hall and the Edinburgh Festival in June and August 1960, catapulted him to the front rank of concert conductors. It was as much of a revelation as Toscanini’s had been for previous generations. Those performances with the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, the fruit of an alliance of three perfectionists – Giulini, chorusmaster Wilhelm Pitz and impresario Walter Legge – led to the classic recording of three years later, the final flowering of the “old” Philharmonia era.

Coming back to the set in its “Great Recordings of the Century” incarnation, with the ideal coupling of the Four Sacred Pieces recorded a year earlier (EMI 567560-2, two discs), what immediately shines out is the blazing, intense vision of Giulini, surely the same vision that Verdi had while composing the Requiem. I have never forgotten seeing the slim, ascetic Giulini on television and being exposed to his extraordinary range of facial expressions, from the suffering to the exulting. “You had just to glance at him to know what to expect,” says chorus alto Jean Taylor; and former Philharmonia cellist Patricia Benham says: “Of all the things we did with him, the Verdi Requiem made its mark on me. I don’t think I’ve heard it in the same way from anyone else. It was always a joy. He was always very deeply into the music, he was obviously very sincere about it. He had very descriptive hands but he was quite without flamboyancy. If you saw his face, he really suffered, but very often the same face would show if he was doing a Mozart symphony or something that should trip along! He felt the music so profoundly.”

Nothing has dated more in the past 50 years than choral singing, so it is a mark of the astounding standard achieved by Pitz and his amateur singers that the choral tone on the September 1963 Kingsway Hall recording still sounds new-minted. Its excellence was acknowledged even by the Italians: within a week of the final session, Giulini and the chorus and orchestra took their interpretation to Parma for the official Verdi sesquicentennial. The local opera chorus, at first miffed that they had not been asked to sing, were so ecstatic that they serenaded the Philharmonia choristers in the town square with “Va pensiero” and ran alongside their coaches as they drove off to the airport. After the June 1960 performance, the critic Neville Cardus wrote: “If I were a soloist of reputation commanding a high fee at that, and if I were singing with the Philharmonia Choir behind me, I might surreptitiously ask myself if I were a good enough vocalist to belong to it.”

In planning the recording, Legge, in his capacity as producer, was both building on company tradition and going against it. The Requiem was “owned” by EMI from the pioneering 1929 Sabajno La Scala 78rpm set. Serafin (twice) and De Sabata conducted worthy successors but the X‑factor was missing from these Italian performances. Could British performers crack the code? Founder Philharmonia Chorus soprano Christine Wattleworth remembers: “We were formed to do the Beethoven Ninth with Klemperer in 1957 and even then Pitz gave us the quiet bits of the Verdi Requiem to do, so that we could practise something that was not so loud.” Soprano Annie Spain recalls that at the conductor’s piano rehearsals for the June 1960 performance, “Giulini changed quite a bit. Instead of being very disciplined it became much more mellow, more pleading, more Italian compared with Pitz’s Germanic style. It took on a new dimension.”

Legge had his chorus and orchestra, but soloists? His 1960 line-up of Sutherland, Cossotto, Ottolini and Vinco worked well but the great soprano was contracted to Decca. Founder chorus tenor Douglas Davies remembers that a year before the sessions, Legge came to a rehearsal and said he had his three lower voices – Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda and Nicolai Ghiaurov – but had still not found his ideal soprano. By June 1963 his wife Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had joined the three paragons for a Royal Festival Hall performance and that was the line-up for the recording (which, incidentally led to a final estrangement between Legge and Maria Callas, who thought he had promised her the soprano role). As Alec Robertson said in his Gramophone review, Schwarzkopf lacked the Aida voice for the part, although she was better than she had been with De Sabata. She sings well in her own way on the finished product, although her plummy, pushy middle and lower registers jar, as do her tortured vowels. Ludwig and Gedda are their usual reliable selves and Ghiaurov is perhaps the best beside Pinza to have recorded the Requiem – listen to him and Gedda in the Hostias. If you want a corrective to the solo sound on the studio recording, I earnestly recommend the April 26, 1964 live Giulini performance with Ilva Ligabue, Grace Bumbry, Sándor Kónya and Raffaele Ariè (BBC Legends mono BBCL4144-2) – Ligabue sings gloriously, with the right tone, in the right style, while Ariè shows that with him and Ghiaurov Bulgaria produced the two most Italianate basses of the age.

Christa Ludwig retains only general impressions of the sessions, which were held on the Monday to Saturday of one week and the Monday to Friday of the next week, mostly at night to accommodate the working people of the chorus. “Giulini was a very religious man,” she says. “The Requiem is always more than an opera but with him it was never just an opera. He was really more introverted – he had an insight into the music.” Gedda, a rarity among tenors in that he will admit to making the odd mistake, has more precise memories. “It was very wonderful, Giulini in his best years. He was always wonderful but then he was fantastic and Walter Legge was a fantastic producer. I was in good form and all the other soloists were in good form. We had some trouble to be in tune at the end – there is an a cappella trio towards the end of the second last movement. We had to do it many times. I think it was maybe my fault – perhaps I was a little flat. We had to do it again and again. Otherwise all went well.”

Not quite all. Chorus, orchestra and Schwarzkopf had to return to Kingsway for a make-up session on April 7, 1964, by which time Legge had dropped his bombshell about disbanding the orchestra. “I wasn’t aware that anything was wrong,” says Jean Taylor, “but we were recalled to do the opening to the Offertorio. The cellists had to do the opening again and again and in the unaccompanied part of the last movement Schwarzkopf kept having a bit of a job getting the high note – we kept on going through it.” Douglas Davies says: “We did it at least 20 times – I think there were 23 takes. At one point she said: ‘The chorus is not in tune.’ Pitz immediately said: ‘My chorus is always in tune.’” Founder soprano Doreen Isles recalls: “There were times when we were recording when somebody else did the high notes – she didn’t always reach the high notes.” Ironic when Schwarzkopf had performed the same service for Flagstad in Tristan. Davies recalls that four high chorus sopranos “covered” Schwarzkopf on the high C at the very end of the Requiem. “That’s standard practice.”

From the cello section, Patricia Benham saw the worst of Legge. “He kept interfering from the back room and Giulini was getting fed up. There was a lot of tension in the hall. It was produced by Legge, who kept saying, ‘Take the back desk off, take the next desk off, just play with one hair of the bow’. Raymond [Clarke, principal cello] went round to listen to one of the takes and he was furious with Legge. ‘Now he wants it louder.’ We thought we’d done a good take and then Legge would cut in before the end and spoil it. The whole orchestra was sitting there, trying not to take notice and put us at our ease. Giulini was more or less tearing his hair out. But he was a very polite and erudite man. He didn’t throw himself about or have tantrums. He once confided to us that he’d played the viola [in the Augusteo Orchestra] and had never forgotten a conductor picking on him and his deskmate. He thought it was a very unnecessary and very unproductive thing to do. He was very aware if we were nervous, he always assumed we were doing our best.” Violinist Béla Dékany, who had moved on by the time of the recording but sat next to leader Hugh Bean from 1958 to 1962, often received the full force of Giulini in the Requiem. “It was incredibly lively and dramatic. He was very intense and very involved, but always a gentleman. He never raised his voice. He was in the Italian army during the war and never raised his voice then. Everyone in the Philharmonia liked him on a human level.” One gets the impression that by April 1964 Legge was lurking in his control room, feeling power ebbing away from him. He had resigned from EMI midway through 1963 and both chorus and orchestra were resisting tooth-and-nail his high-handed attempt to shut them down. “Walter Legge always made problems,” says Doreen Isles. “He always wanted somebody moved, something different from what was set up.” The finished recording is not perfect: there is distortion, which Legge apparently thought was appropriate in heavier passages and engineer Neville Boyling felt he was deliberately made to balance the chorus backwardly – one wonders why he did not fight his corner. “Walter Legge always did his balances to the disrespect of the chorus,” says Davies. “It always sounds as if it’s singing through a blanket. I don’t think the recording is special.”

Boyling’s shocking allegation (made to Malcolm Walker) that Legge sabotaged the contributions of chorus and orchestra because they were resisting him surely does not bear scrutiny. When most of the Requiem was taped, in September 1963, Legge may well have been contemplating closing down the Philharmonia, but no one else had any inkling of such a plan. Not long after the main sessions in September, when they had all gone to Parma and triumphed, he was writing his usual effusive thank-you letter to each chorus member. Only at the make-up session in April 1964 could he have committed any sabotage or have had any motive for so doing. In any case, to my ears the Verdi Requiem recording does great justice to Giulini’s spiritual vision.

“Giulini was wonderful,” says Davies. “That was what made it special. By the time of that recording, working with Giulini was like being part of a Ferrari – you felt the driver could do anything, could make that car talk. We had been doing the work for four or five years and we knew that this was something special. There was a feeling in the chorus of great responsibility, a feeling that ‘we must get this down’. You were well aware that you were taking part in something special.”

Christine Wattleworth agrees. “Working with Giulini was almost like being in church. He was an intensely devout man. He developed while were working with him. When he first started he was diffident, but he could express what he wanted with his hands. He worked very closely with Wilhelm Pitz. He didn’t waste time talking, his English was very limited, but he was always living the work. He was so intensely inside the music. It was that characteristic, I think, that brought us close to him and gave our concerts with him an extra dimension.”

In the last analysis, there was something deeply Italianate about Giulini’s musicianship and it clearly communicated itself to the normally reserved Britons of the chorus and orchestra. Certainly it had a sexual element – “He was everybody’s pin-up,” says Doreen Isles – but in the main it was musical. And his ability to get under the skin of the music enabled him to achieve a rare spontaneity in the studio.

“He was a wonderful person to work with,” says Jean Taylor. “I was a bit new to commercial recording. The stops and starts were unsettling and I was amazed that Giulini always managed to pick up again and convey the continuity of the performance to us.” She sums up the man’s appeal in one sentence: “Klemperer was possessed by Beethoven and Giulini was possessed by Verdi.” 

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