There is not enough wrong with this performance. Berlioz's Requiem is a dangerous piece, one that should hover on the edge of disaster. It is not best served by the kind of interpretative smoothness that will not take risks; and this is what, for almost all the time, occurs here. It is not the fault of the singers and players. The Boston Symphony play beautifully, and not even too beautifully, for the trombones are willing to produce a bit of a snarl in their chords in the ''Hostias'', and the basses and bassoons a growling answer to the upper parts in one passage of the ''Lacrimosa''. There are some lovely cor anglais sounds in the ''Quid sum miser''. But the chorus are here directed by Berlioz to sing ''with a feeling of fear and humility'': they sound bursting with confidence, and at the ''Tuba mirum'' to be admiring the tonal splendour of what is, fearfully, the Last Trump.
A fine chorus cannot be blamed for singing so mellifluously. Few are so fortunate in their tenors, who sing ravishingly in the ''Quid sum miser''; few have such an even tonal blend across the entire choral spectrum. What they can do musically is shown in the most impassioned part of the performance, the climax of the ''Lacrimosa''. The responsibility for something less than singers and players could deliver must rest with Ozawa. His rhythms are safe and inert from the start (the limp descending quavers of the opening ''Requiem''), his tempos enervating, his movement through the music predictable: the straining upward scales and wrenching modulations of the ''Dies irae'' are played, of all things, as if they were ordinary. There is elegance in abundance here, and lovely sounds, and graceful singing (including from the excellent tenor, Vinson Cole). But not the drama of the Requiem.'