Rufus Wainwright's latest work, Dream Requiem, is an epic work for orchestra, chorus, soprano and narrator. It received its world premiere in June 2024 in Paris with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the chorus and children’s choir of Radio France conducted by Mikko Franck with Meryl Streep as the narrator and soprano Anna Prohaska.
On 17th January 2025, Warner Classics will release the live recording from the premiere. A co-commission from major cultural institutions in the US, UK and Europe, Dream Requiem was written during the pandemic and in Wainwright’s own words it’s a requiem "for the people we have lost in this crisis, for the past from which we are cut off and for the future to which we do not yet know how to connect, a Requiem for human contact, solidarity and the human voice that have all become dangerous and contagious." Dream Requiem is also a reflection on environmental collapse with its text combining words from the Latin Mass for the Dead – as used by Verdi, Britten, Mozart and many others – with Lord Byron's apocalyptic poem Darkness, an imagined dream about total planetary ecological collapse written after the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1915 that darkened the skies worldwide and led to the “year without a summer.”
Stream or purchase the album here: https://w.lnk.to/drequiem
Over the next two years, Dream Requiem will be performed at major international venues including in 2025 Barcelona’s Palau de la Musica, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles with Jane Fonda, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.