Durham Singers, directed by Tom Edney
Alison Gill and David M. Harris, piano
Anna Dias, soprano
Joshua Lane, baritone

Clara Schumann, Abendfeier in Venedig, from Drei gemischte Chöre
Johannes Brahms, Hyperions-Schicksalslied
George Frederick Handel, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, Messiah
Johannes Brahms, Ein Deutsches Requiem

In his German Requiem, Brahms sets texts from the Lutheran Bible, avoiding the traditional Latin mass fire and brimstone and instead turning to words that offer comfort to the living: he said himself that the work could also be called ‘A Human Requiem’. The aria ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ was inserted into the first performance to satisfy concerns from the clergy at Bremen cathedral about the lack Christian content in the piece.

Brahms wrote the Requiem after the deaths of Brahms’s mother and of his great friend Robert Schumann. ‘Abendfeier in Venedig’ by Robert’s wife Clara Schumann is a call to prayer at the end of the day. Brahms’s Schicksalslied (‘Song of Fate’) is another secular repsonse to death, setting a text by Frederick Hölderlin. It is performed here in a four-hand piano arrangement, along with the composer’s own piano arrangement of the Requiem, bringing out all the chamber music intimacy of Brahms’s writing.

Tickets £15 / students £10 / under-16s free
Available soon from choir members or online