IN CONCERT
CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble: Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, conducted by Michael Gormley
When/where: Saturday, 7: 20 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral (Quadra Street at Rockland Avenue)
Tickets: Adults $25, seniors $22, students $10. In person at Ivy's Bookshop, Munro's Books, Long and McQuade, and the cathedral office (930 Burdett Ave.), and from choir members
Transcription - the art of transferring music from one performance medium to another - has been championed before in this space, especially when it comes to over-familiar repertoire. Transcription casts new light on a work, and can refresh even the stalest warhorses. Indeed, the more familiar the piece, the more welcome the relief a transcription can provide. For performers and concertgoers alike, there is an eatingone's-cake-and-having-it-too aspect to programming transcriptions - the comfort of the known plus the fascination of the new.
On Saturday, the final concert of the CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble's season will be devoted to just such a defamiliarization of a repertoire staple: Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), Brahms's grandest work for chorus and orchestra, performed by a chamber choir accompanied only by a piano duet (i.e., four hands on one keyboard). The work actually had its London premi猫re in this form, in a private salon in 1871, and there are recordings of it with piano duet, though CapriCCio's director, Michael Gormley, who has lived in Victoria since 1984, knows of no previous such performance here.
A transcription is not necessarily musically enlightening, admittedly; it can be a mere stunt - G脙露tterd脙陇mmerung on the accordion, that sort of thing. In the present case, however, the "domestic" scale of the chamber-choir-and-piano-duet setting seems fitting, since the German Requiem, though monumental and profound, is also an intimate, deeply private work.
Completed by 1868, it was not commissioned or intended for any public occasion; Brahms conceived it for wholly personal reasons, and discussed it only with his closest friends. (One of them was Robert Schumann's widow, Clara, herself a renowned pianist and composer, and Gormley, in Saturday's concert, plans to read some words by both Brahms and Clara between movements.)
Obviously this project had special meaning for Brahms, and the resulting work was novel and idiosyncratic in many ways. For one thing, it is in German, not the Latin of the traditional Requiem Mass, and Brahms scrapped the original Requiem text in favour of his own selections from Luther's Bible, which form a logical seven-movement sequence. The inevitability of death is stressed in Nos. 1, 2 and 3, though mourning and despair are balanced by consolation, hope and confidence in God. Nos. 4 and 5 - respectively, a song of praise for the state of eternal bliss and a song of comfort to an individual mourner - are more contemplative. No. 6 refers to resurrection of the dead and the transformation of their souls, while No. 7 reassures us that a state of blessedness awaits us in death, as a reward for our labour, patience and faith.
Brahms had been raised Lutheran, but his religious faith, though deep, was unconventional; his Requiem, not surprisingly, serves no liturgical function and is not bound by theological orthodoxy. He seems to have appropriated the Bible more for its literary and philosophical merits than for its religious doctrines, and the result is an ultimately optimistic meditation on death concerned more with comforting the living than worrying about the souls of the dead.
The music is no less personal than the text, reflecting Brahms's pronounced (and once controversial) "antiquarian" bent. The score is laced with allusions to venerable musical procedures - fugue and other kinds of strict counterpoint, chorale and chorale prelude, recitative and aria, variation, sonata, funeral march - as though Brahms sought to place himself within the history of German Protestant church music, alongside such heroes as Sch脙录tz and Bach.
The music is mostly serious, solemn, and slow, and though richly and expressively and subtly scored for a large orchestra, it tends to sound dark and sober - it never glitters. And so, it could be argued, less is lost in the piano-duet transcription than would be the case with more colourful and dramatic Requiems (Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Britten).
In Saturday's performance, pianists Wendy Stofer and Jane Edler-Davis will supply a duet accompaniment drawn from Brahms's own four-hand reduction of the German Requiem, published in 1869 and dubbed "altogether splendid" by the composer himself. (Brahms also personally arranged the very difficult solo-piano accompaniment published in the vocal score.)
The solo vocal parts featured in several movements will be sung by two Victoria natives: lyric-coloratura soprano Eve-Lyn de la Haye, who lives in Toronto, and bass-baritone Chad Louwerse, who lives in London, Ont., and has appeared several times with Pacific Opera Victoria, most recently in Rossini's La Cenerentola, in 2010.
