Brahms Pichon

A world removed from the grand and awesome visions of the Last Judgement that so often characterize settings of the Mass for the Dead, Brahms conceived a work of ‘consolation for those who are suffering’. Having spent more than ten years absorbing this German ‘humanist’ Requiem, Pichon and Pygmalion have meticulously shaped every bar of this compact work, achieving a form of polyphonic transparency that confounds the senses and transcends the universality of the Requiem's message.

One morning in 1822, Schubert wrote down an enigmatic text in which all his ghosts seem to take shape: wandering, solitude, consolation, disappointed love. Inspired by this dreamlike narrative, Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion and Stéphane Degout have devised a vast Romantic fresco, combining resurrection of unknown treasures with rediscovery of established masterpieces.

Raphaël Pichon has invited Stéphane Degout to make his recording debut for harmonia mundi in a multifaceted exploration of the Underworld. The French baritone reincarnates the figure of Henri Larrivée, the famous tragedian of Rameau and Gluck. Around a reconstruction of an imaginary Mass of the Dead, sacred and secular merge, revealing some of the most extraordinary pieces from the operatic repertory of the Enlightenment. Music of death and mourning on an epic scale that inspires Pygmalion to overwhelming heights of pathos.

Tenor Laurence Kilsby, together with accompanist Ella O'Neill , performs pieces by Brahms, Wolf, Saint-Saens, Britten, Schonberg, Clarke, Heggie, Weil and more.