Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem Accentus

Celebrating 80 years of vigorous artistic life with Brahms’ expansive and consoling mass for the dead, Ein deutsches Requiem, the hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra) under its Chief Conductor Paavo Järvi, is joined by soprano Natalie Dessay, baritone Ludovic Tézier and the Swedish Radio Choir in an interpretation described as “exemplary” by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Herbert von Karajan conducted Brahms's choral masterpiece frequently throughout his long career, but only once on film and with both of these outstanding soloists. This unique document from the 1978 Salzburg Easter Festival was acclaimed by Diapason as "a magical interpretation, prodigiously realized … with a sublime fusion of timbres, a cohesion and, ultimately, a simplicity that are truly unequalled."

This is an indispensable document, capturing Otto Klemperer in an incandescent moment from Feb. 1956 in Cologne. The program notes say that this live reading of the German Requiem "easily surpasses" the conductor's EMI recording from just a few years later – and that is an understatement. It's a wholly different interpretation, full of urgency and spiritual passion of the kind all but unmatched on disc. Furtwangler made two versions in execrable sound that could be said to match this one, and there's Karajan's celebrated account from the ruins of postwar Vienna, best heard in remastering on Naxos Historical.

Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir in a luminous, expansive performance of Brahms' German Requiem recorded live in 2009, during Nézet-Séguin's first season as the orchestra's principal guest conductor. The conductor's conception is notable for creating a sense of breadth and serenity while maintaining a purposefulness and momentum that never allow the long lines to sag; it's a beautifully executed balancing act that allows the work to unfold with the spaciousness and grandeur it needs to make its maximum impact.

This is a rather brisk reading of Brahms' masterpiece, the most ambitious work in his output and one of the greatest compositions of its type. Though Herreweghe's tempos often pushed the music to its limits here (except for the first section), the performance never actually sounded fast, or at least not offensively fast. In fact, it challenges the Levine/RCA effort.

Bruno Walter is a conductor who knew how to stamp the works he conducted and recorded, especially those from the religious repertory, with the seal of his warm poetic sensitivity and his radiant humanity. Through these scores, he manages to communicate his vision to us, and, without ever forcing an already strong text, without false sentiment or gratuitous effect, he leaves us room for a more personal interpretation of the music. Brahms composed his Requiem at the beginning of his career, at under thirty-five- the age at which Mozart died (this means that both composers wrote their Requiems at about the same age).

Musical settings of the Requiem understandably encompass a vast expressive gamut, from Mozart's fear and trembling to the seraphic gentleness of Fauré. But the focus in Brahms's German Requiem–his first large-scale work–is not so much on the departed as on those left behind and the work of memory. In lieu of the traditional Latin liturgy, Brahms uses texts culled from the Lutheran Bible that range from despair at our mortal condition to the solace offered by faith. John Elliott Gardiner and his forces here attempt to replicate the orchestral sound and style of Brahms's own time, using period bowing practices for the strings and mellow Viennese horns, to cite a few examples. The result is a magnificent and deeply moving performance that features excellent integration of the orchestra and chorus.

Something new is always to be expected whenever Nikolaus Harnoncourt turns his attention to an important piece of music. In recent years he has been giving audiences a fresh view on some of the masterpieces of Romantic and late-Romantic music. His account of Brahms’ German Requiem is based on a thorough study of the composer’s ideas on how it should be performed.