Music: Buffo Requiem

Domenico Cimarosa was a fast and witty writer of Italian opera who cranked out some 65 works in a comparatively short lifetime (he died at 51). The only one that survives is No. 49—a comic opera titled ll Matrimonio Segreto, which pleased Austria's Emperor Leopold II so much at the premiere that he demanded a repeat of the entire score as an encore. Last week Manhattan concertgoers turned out to sample another side of Cimarosa's musical personality. The occasion: the first known public performance of a requiem Mass written by Cimarosa in Russia in 1788 and since then stored away in...

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