Of these two new recordings, Hickox on Chandos is probably the one that most listeners will want to concentrate upon, but Rilling is not negligible either. They walk the same road, these conductors, not always in step, and observing different things on the way, but with broadly similar ends in view. There is of course another. It is rather like the line in T. S. Eliot: ''Who is the third who walks always beside you?'' Eliot couldn't quite make him out, but I daresay Rilling and Hickox would recognize him easily enough and exclaim: ''Why, it's Mr Gardiner!''.
Gardiner's Philips recording of this work did not win quite the universal acclaim of his 1991 Gramophone Award-winning Missa solemnis which appeared at roughly the same time, but it was enthusiastically received in these columns both by LS in the first review and by myself in last July's ''Quarterly Retrospect''. It was a highly memorable, totally distinctive performance and is bound to affect the consideration of other recordings for many years to come. It carried with it the zeal and insight of the convert. Gardiner had once thought the work ''lugubrious and pompous'', but had now discovered that it isn't. He accordingly favoured faster speeds than usual (though not faster than the score markings), aiming at clarity and when possible lightness and vigour. Both of these present versions are much more traditional, though also less reactionary in the literal sense of that abused word. Both of them produce a warmer sound, settle for the kind of tempo that has usually been found comfortable, and accept, too, that comfort (rather than some more Spartan quality) is the essence, the very soul, of this Requiem.
Rilling cares for it a great deal, perhaps making his care too obvious. In the opening bars, for instance, he very carefully 'breathes' at the end of each phrase, and throughout he is likely to care for a cadence or a bridge-passage with a generously spread rallentando: the end of the second number is one example out of many, the rallentando starting some 12 bars back from the end and persisting through the scale-passages, where Hickox leaves it till the very end, and that proves to be quite enough. The middle movements go best here, with ''Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen'' achieving a rare lightness and buoyancy. There are good soloists, too, Donna Brown (a Canadian soprano who has made a large part of her career in France) singing with pure tone and admirable control. Recorded sound, though less clear and full-bodied than in the Hickox, is pleasant if a little dull.
Hickox gives a remarkably satisfying performance. Again, take the opening bars as an instance: he is not insistent on the 'punctuation' (which hardly needs help from the conductor) but does observe more meticulously than most the many crescendo-decrescendo marks on individual notes, and brings out the growly counterpoint in the lower strings. His crescendo in ''Denn alles Fleisch'' comes to a great broad climax with the fortissimo entry of the choir (like a procession now coming right up, face to face). In the fugues he secures plenty of rhythmic 'lift' and there is cumulative splendour too. Felicity Lott and David Wilson-Johnson are fine soloists, he singing with more resonance and ease on the high notes than Cachemaille with Rilling. Choir and orchestra are excellent and well-balanced, both in themselves and with each other.
And the third, the inevitable source of comparisons? There were times, while making them, when I warmed to the sheer generosity of style and sound in Hickox and found Gardiner a little too spare in sound-quality, a little too deliberate in style. Yet playing straight through one of the longer movements—the sixth in this instance—one is caught up in the power of it: everything is specific and yet all part of a unified concept: which is not to be missed, even if this new version of Hickox's presents what most of us would still feel to be more Brahmslike Brahms.'