Join host Marguerite Munsche on Sunday evening, March 13, 2016, for our third broadcast from the Missoula Symphony Orchestra and Chorale's 61st season. Darko Butorac is the orchestra's music director; Dean Peterson directs the Symphony Chorale. The program featured a single work: "A German Requiem," by Johannes Brahms. It was recorded February 27 & 28, 2016, in the Dennison Theater at the University of Montana-Missoula, and featured guest vocal soloists Christina Pier and Charles Robert Stephens. Thomas Heuser was this concert's guest conductor.
"...overall, the message of Brahms’ Requiem is fundamentally different from that of more traditional works; and so is the musical language. As in so much of Brahms’ music, this is densely harmonized music, in which the linear melody is often appointed in such rich harmonies that it can, on first listen, occasionally be obscured. In those moments, it’s worth savoring the richness of Brahms’ harmonies, his sense of balance and appropriate heft.
And then, like a razor slicing through velvet, the melody will re-emerge, pointing the way toward the next idea — which, in this case, is ever toward comfort and redemption: “Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors,” the chorus sings in the last movement, quoting Revelation xiv. 13: “And their works do follow them.”" - Joe Nickell's program notes.
