Robert Spano, a successor once removed of Shaw as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, will conduct, and Norman Mackenzie, Shaw’s immediate successor as director of the Atlanta Symphony Chorus, will oversee the workshop, aided by members of the orchestra’s chamber chorus. The festival chorus will be joined by the National High School Festival Chorus and Thomas Cooley, as tenor soloist.

Mr. Spano recorded the work with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in 2003 for Telarc. (He should not take it amiss if I also recommend the classic Charles Munch recording for RCA with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the tenor Léopold Simoneau from 1959, the first I knew.) That outing, Mr. Spano said in a recent interview, represented his only encounter with the work, though he has been “a Berlioz fanatic” all his life.

“I find him to be out of time,” he added. “He always seems to be avant-garde to me, fresh and daring.”

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And extravagant, he might have added, beyond the means of most performing groups. The score of the Requiem calls for an orchestra of 140 — independent of the 38 brass players in the auxiliary bands, 10 timpanists and other percussionists — and a chorus of 210. (Major orchestras today have 100 or so players.) And no, Berlioz wasn’t kidding when he added, “If space permits, the chorus may be doubled or tripled and the orchestra proportionately increased.”

A live recording of the work from 1987 on the Musica Opera Sacra label, conducted by Jean-Pierre Loré at the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris, advertised 800 participants. Not for nothing does the performance sound — the occasional cataclysm apart — distant, inert and at times almost comically disunified.

Since it was mainly the drama of the apocalypse that attracted Berlioz to the Requiem in the first place, he seems to have had few compunctions about trimming and adapting the liturgical text; “mangling,” some have said. He organized the standard sections of the Mass and the parts added specifically to a Requiem into 10 movements, often presenting stark juxtapositions of subdued, airless utterances and grand blowouts.

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The first of the big brass and percussion effects comes in the Dies Irae (No. 2), at “Tuba mirum,” where, in the text, the trumpet spreads its wondrous sound to the tombs of every region. Mozart used a solo trombone; Verdi essentially imported brass fanfares from “Aida.” Berlioz uses four groups of 8 to 12 brass players, specifying that they be positioned north, east, west and south.

The other big statements are in “Rex tremendae majestatis” (“King of fearful majesty,” No. 4) and “Lacrymosa dies illa” (“That tearful day,” No. 6). The brasses and drums reappear at the end of the work, in the Agnus Dei (No. 10), when Berlioz uses the return of “Requiem aeternam” (“Eternal rest”) as the basis for a musical summation. But now everything is hushed as, at “Amen,” eight timpanists beat out rhythms at a piano dynamic, eventually fading to pianissimo (pp) and finally a barely audible triple piano, and the long journey that began in gloomy G minor ends in understated and resigned G major. The moment is made all the more powerful by an awareness of the thunderous potential of those many kettledrums left untapped.

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Other subtleties too abound beneath the work’s obvious effects. Literally and figuratively Berlioz wrote the book on instrumentation, and another feature of that final summation is a series of chords combining four flutes, high and slender, with eight trombones, low and burly.

That outlandish bit of orchestration (this time with only three flutes) is a building block of “Hostias et preces tibi” (“Sacrifices and prayers to you,” No. 8), where it is the principal accompaniment to a hymnlike treatment of the chorus. As often as not, with a world of sound at his command, Berlioz achieves his purposes with utmost simplicity.

Nowhere is that economy more striking than in the Offertorium (No. 7). For most of the long movement, until a final genteel jailbreak when the text speaks of the multiplying seed of Abraham, the chorus is confined to just two notes a half step apart: A, rising to B flat and slumping back, over and over in rhythms varied to suit the words. Berlioz, meanwhile, works his orchestral magic around this pattern, providing an ever shifting array of harmonic contexts.

The tenor soloist (or, alternatively, a chorus of 10 tenors in unison) appears only in the Sanctus (No. 9). That is also the movement in which Berlioz trod most heavily on the text, jettisoning the undramatic Benedictus section (“Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord”) in favor of a repeat of the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy”).

Where some might dwell on lacunas, others can point to purposeful incisiveness and imaginative synthesis. And to those who still subscribe to the hoary canard that Berlioz had genius but no talent, Mr. Spano had a simple response: “How much talent did he need?”