Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem and Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man (Choral Suite)

This will be a performance of two contrasting choral works, one an acknowledged masterpiece, the other a contemporary classic.

Brahms began work on his sublime German Requiem following the death in 1856 of his close friend and fellow composer, Robert Schumann. A notoriously slow and self-critical worker, Brahms only completed it a decade later, after the death of his mother, when he added in tribute to her a movement featuring a soprano soloist. Rather than using the text of the Catholic Latin mass, Brahms chose for his German Requiem traditional words of comfort for the bereaved from the Lutheran Bible. The result is a work that acknowledges personal suffering and grief and attempts to offer consolation. Originally conceived for two soloists, choir and large orchestra, Brahms himself made a transcription of the orchestra’s role for piano, four hands. It is this intimate, chamber music-like account of Brahms’s great score that will be performed this evening.

Commissioned for the millennium and dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo crisis, Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man is a powerful and compelling account of the descent into the horrors of war before offering hope for a peaceful future. The work has captured the popular imagination to become one of the most performed and poignant choral works of the moment. This will be a performance of the composer’s five-movement choral suite, which distils many of the piece’s most striking elements.