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Warwickshire Singers perform Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem

  • 2 hours ago
  • 2 min read

Warwickshire Singers perform Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) conducted by Jim Bate in St Nicholas Church, Warwick on Saturday 18 April at 7pm.

Preview


Following their sold-out Christmas concert, join Warwickshire Singers as they sing Brahms’s beautiful and uplifting Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) conducted by Jim Bate, in the glorious surroundings of St Nicholas Church, Warwick. This popular and deeply emotional work captures the sadness of human experience, while expressing consolation and hope, transporting us all to a better place.


The sound of soaring voices, the rich colours of the piano accompaniment (one grand piano, four hands!) and Brahms’s stirring harmonies are sure to make this a truly uplifting evening. The choir will be joined by soloists, soprano Beth Lewin and baritone Freddie Ingles, with David King and Adrian Moore providing the spectacular double-hands piano accompaniment.


Soprano, Beth Lewin is a student at the David Seligman Opera School at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD), and is a graduate of their Masters programme, where she was delighted to win the Dolan Evans Lord Rowe Beddoe Prize, be a finalist in the Janet Price Opera Prize and Adelina Patti Prize, and a semi-finalist in the Sir Ian Stoutzker competition.


Baritone, Freddie Ingles started singing with the boys’ choir, Libera, in 2007. With them, he sang in major concert halls in the United States, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. He studied Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences at the University of Birmingham, majoring in Linguistics and Performance, graduating with a first-class degree.


Johannes Brahms (1832 – 1897)

Ein deutsches Requiem, A German Requiem, was published in 1856 shortly after the death of Brahms’s great friend, Robert Schumann. Rather than as a commemorative mass for the dead, it seems that Brahms conceived the work as a resource for comfort and hope to the living and bereaved – perhaps in the first instance for Schumann’s wife, the composer Clara Schumann.

“It was such a joy as I have not felt for a long time…” (Clara Schumann, journal entry, 10th April 1868).


Johannes sent Clara the words for movements one and two before he shared the music with her, asking her approval in choosing German above Latin. The theme of comforting the bereaved runs throughout, most overtly in the text of the first and fifth movements. One line in the third movement could sum up the meaning of the whole work: “Wess soll ich mich trösten?”, which translates as “How shall I console myself?”. The work is, in essence, about the search for comfort in the face of grief.

 

The Requiem is scored for a four-part choir with orchestra. However, for Warwickshire Singers’ performance, they will be using Brahms’s alternative scoring with piano-duet accompaniment (four hands on one piano), the version used at the first complete performance of the Requiem in London in July 1871. On that occasion, the work was sung in English, but Warwickshire Singers will be performing it in German. 


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