Organization

Conductor

David Temple

Singer

Soprano

Francesca Chiejina

Baritone

Oliver Zwarg

Others

Crouch End Festival Chorus

Orchestra

London Orchestra da Camera

Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem

London

United Kingdom

Alexandra Palace Theatre

Public

A German Requiem

The Wreckers

Wailing Woman

Approved

Ahead of its performance at this year’s BBC Proms, Crouch End Festival Chorus is returning to Alexandra Palace Theatre for its next concert on Sunday 9 July.

Brahms started writing his great Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) in the months following the death of his cherished mother in February 1865. Widely considered to be the greatest of all the Requiems, it is written for soprano, baritone, choir and orchestra and is a work of great comfort, focusing more on those who are left to mourn than those who have departed, with moments of great joy as well as sadness. Brahms’s Requiem is by no means a conventionally Christian work, but it is grounded in the tradition of German Lutheran church music. Its appeal is universal, as Brahms intended it to be. Commenting on its title, Brahms wrote, ‘I will admit that I could happily omit the German and simply say Human’.

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was a pioneering composer who took on the male musical establishment of her time to get her works performed. The Wreckers was her third and most successful opera; the overture, which is one of Smyth’s most performed orchestral works, reflects the opera’s themes of the sea, and of love.

Wailing Woman is a rarely-performed cantata for soprano, chorus and orchestra written by the African American composer, William Grant Still, in 1946. The libretto was written by his wife Verna Arvey whose parents had fled the Russian pogroms at the turn of the 20th century. The cantata compares the Jewish experience with that of African Americans and in the ghettoes of Europe under the Nazis. However, it is not a lament, rather a cry of defiance that calls for reconciliation.

English

Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem by Brahms, Smyth, Still, W. G., From (2023/2023), Conductor David Temple, Alexandra Palace Theatre, London, United Kingdom

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

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