Brahms: Soloists, New York Choral Artists, Joseph Flummerfelt, (director) New York Philharmonic /Lorin Maazel, Avery Fisher Hall, New York City 5.6. 2007 (BH)

Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a (1873)
Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), Op. 45 (1861-68)

Celena Shafer, Soprano

Matthias Goerne, Baritone

Back in the 1990s, Riccardo Chailly partnered Brahms with Schoenberg, and I suspect there are some even more contemporary voices – perhaps even contemporary romantics (in keeping with this concert’s theme) who could offer fresh insights and underscore Brahms from a more oblique angle.  I couldn’t help but muse on those pairings during the opening Variations on a Theme by Haydn that was elegantly played, but just a tad plain.  Perhaps Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic would have been happier tinkering with the programming a little.  My modest suggestion would have been to find something from another composer writing roughly around 1865, to put the great achievement of Ein deutsches Requiem in a different context, or to ask the superb New York Choral Artists to do say, Brahms’ Four Songs for Women’s Chorus, Two French Horns and Harp, written just a few years earlier.

The second half brought more passion to the evening.  I brought a friend who had never heard the Requiem, nor any Brahms at all to the best of my knowledge, and after just five or ten minutes, she whispered, “I want to take that choral sound and just wrap myself in it.”  (I highly recommend hearing any much-loved work through new ears.)  With texts drawn from the Bible, Brahms drew additional inspiration from the death of his mother, and this Requiem is often contemplative, sometimes forceful, ultimately reverent and reassuring.  The New York Choral Artists, immaculately prepared by Joseph Flummerfelt, were particularly effective in the fiercely exciting second section, “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.”  “Luminous” and “stirring” were the first words that came to mind in Section III, “The souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, And no pain touches them,” and the fourth part, from Psalm 84 showed them in the roles of wise, gentle teachers.  Everywhere their precise entrances and unanimity in cutoffs were unusually satisfying.

Coincidentally, the friend with me had also seen Matthias Goerne last season in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which not only capitalized on the singer’s voice but also his sometimes-outsized gestures and expressions.  There is no denying that he has one of the most lustrous and soulful instruments today, and I don’t know what he can’t sing.  Here he brought requisite gravitas, with an occasional dip into slight religious fervor, now and then appearing almost terrified.  Celena Shafer was light-voiced and angelic in her sole appearance, making me wish Brahms had given her more music.  When she looked out at the audience and slowly lowered her hands while gently intoning, “…I will see you again,” some audience members would have been hard-pressed to keep back a tear or two.

Maazel seemed much more engaged here than in the first half.  In the sixth section that includes “Death is swallowed up by victory,” he found a storminess that could have been Verdi, with the orchestra swept up in appropriately victorious torrents.  I was not in the audience when this work last appeared here, shortly after 9/11 with Kurt Masur at the podium.  If that performance benefited from the unexpected emotions of history, this one offered some lustrous vocal technique, sumptuous on its own terms.

 

Bruce Hodges