Brahms Sacred Choral Music

This disc gathers all of Brahms' sacred choral music for unaccompanied mixed voices, except for the Sieben Marienlieder of 1859. Taken together with the accompanied sacred choral pieces, including the monumental German Requiem, this amounts to a significant body of work for a composer of his era who was not religious. Brahms was a skilled choral composer and it's a shame that his smaller a cappella works aren't performed more frequently. Except for Zwei Motetten from 1864, all these works come from the last two decades of his life.

This fabulous recording featuring Matthew Best and the Corydon Singers was first released in 1989 at a time when they were recording the standard repertoire for small choirs for Hyperion, and this disc of Brahms' motets and shorter sacred choral pieces was, and is, one of their finest. From the smooth and lovely Ave Maria for women's choir and organ through their hard and harsh "Warum is das Licht gegeben?" to their craggy yet consoling "Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein," Best and his choir deliver technically impeccable and deeply moving performances. The Corydon Singers tend toward a big, lush, and slightly fruity sound, as is common with English choirs. But one cannot fault their diction, articulation, pronunciation or their tone, blend, and balance. Best's interpretations are soulful but not sentimental and expressive but not excessive. Recorded in full-bodied digital sound, these performances will likely please fans of Brahms' sacred choral music.

In his own lifetime (1839–1901), Joseph Rheinberger was more sought after as a professor of organ and composition than he was recognized as a great composer. His roll call of students at the conservatoire in Munich was long and impressive, including Humperdinck, Wolf-Ferrari and Furtwängler. However, Rheinberger produced a significant catalogue of sacred music in particular, concentrated on choir and organ. Sometimes unfavourably compared to Brahms, he is more usefully regarded as a south-German Fauré – for the gentle contours of his melodies and the softly rounded quality of his choral writing. The principal work on this new album is the Mass for four-part men’s chorus which he composed in 1898, and which has become a staple of the male chorus repertoire around the world. By no means as staid or sober as its scoring might suggest, the Mass is a work of resonant beauty and sweetness, a concise and elegant demonstration of Rheinberger’s melodic gifts and his embodiment of Catholic values in the secular musical culture of late 19th-century Germany.

The genre accompanied him for almost his entire creative career: the sacred choral song op. 30 was written by the 23-year-old Johannes Brahms in 1856, the Fünf Gesänge for mixed choir a cappella are his late legacy in the field of secular choral song, composed between 1886 and 1888. In between lie the Drei Gesänge, composed at a time when Brahms was also very practically involved with choral singing as a choirmaster, then the Sieben Lieder for four to eight-part choir and finally his large-scale Mottete op. 74, No. 1 Warum ist das Licht gegeben from 1877 and the sister work O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf op. 74 No. 2. Over the course of more than 30 years, the composer showed a fascinating development which – of course always in the most demanding style – led from the romantic opulence of the six- to eight-part movement to more reduced austerity. Chorwerk Ruhr traces this development with fascinating intensity.

Throughout his composing career, from his Hamburg days onwards, Brahms was devoted to writing choral music, both religious and secular, superbly crafted. In their recording, Robert Jones and the Choir of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, give fresh, clear performances. They are beautifully scaled to give the illusion of church performance, helped by warm, atmospheric recording.

For Anyone who finds the textual/musical idiom of Ein deutsches Requiem difficult to accommodate, this mixture of sacred and secular pieces could serve as a way into the choral music of a very great composer.

Founded in 1991 by French choral director Laurence Equilbey, the 32-member Choeur de Chambre Accentus' 1996 Virgin recording of a cappella songs and ballads by Brahms and Schumann is as clear and lovely as a cloud-flecked sky in early October. Composed during his early years in Hamburg, Brahms' Gesänge, Op. 42, are robustly romantic, while his Gesänge, Op. 104, composed during his late maturity in Vienna, are autumnally nostalgic. Composed primarily in Dresden, Schumann wrote his Romanzen und Ballades about the same time he started his long, slow decline into madness. But in these performances by the Accentus Chamber Choir, all the music – early, mature, or melancholy – sounds crisp, alert, and strong.