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In their second program at the Kauffman Center, the Kansas City Symphony and the Symphony Chorus took to the stage together to present Brahms’ Ein deutches Requiem, along with some Messiaen and Beethoven, before a sold-out audience Friday evening.

Opening the concert with Beethoven’s brief Elegischer Gesang, Op. 118, the strings provided a warm, mellifluous introduction to the chorus’ lovely, refined sound. The elegy for Eleanore Pasqualati, the wife of a baron who took on the composer as a lodger from 1804–14, was well paced and lovely, despite egregiously garbled “s” sounds (a small defect which nonetheless plagued the Chorus).

Kansas City Symphony Chorus Director Charles Bruffy took the stage next in an unannounced reprisal of Mark Hayes’ This Moment, which the Chorus had performed at the Kauffman opening gala in September. The a cappella song displayed the full range of the chorus from ppp soli passages to divisi forte textures.

Messiaen’s Les offrandes oubliées gave the chorus some respite before the Requiem. The triple-wind orchestral work opened with slow, restless string leaps, made more eerie by a pair of horn long-tones at the interval of a minor second. The second movement opened with a fiery transition and featured strong percussion accents before the third movement returned to the unearthly, wintry textures of the first movement.

In the Requiem, the symphony and chorus came together perfectly to present Brahms’ masterpiece on the human experience. The work is set with German text from the Lutheran Bible, setting it apart from the Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead. Brahms’ text is carefully chosen, eschewing direct mentions of Christ in favor of a kind of spiritual humanism.

The first movement opening was sublime, the orchestral and vocal forces were well balanced and diction was good. Lovely intonation and color from the chorus highlighted Brahms’ beautiful, intricate part-writing. The second movement’s assent to a brilliant fortissimo was powerful, yet somehow the music became even more heroically moving with a second fortissimo crest in the movement.

The third movement was the first of two featuring baritone soloist Christopher Feigum. Feigum brought a rich, cultured voice to the text which was delivered with excellent diction. For me the energy waned somewhat in the fourth movement, with a weaker tone by the male choir partly at issue. Soprano soloist Layla Claire restored some of this lagging energy in fifth movement. Text was difficult to discern at times, but Claire brought a beautiful lyric tone to the text and her high notes soared and sparkled about the orchestra and chorus.

Feigum returned as soloist on the sixth movement, which had many of the most impressive moments of the piece. Feigum delivered another solid performance, though it was the powerful choral refrain accompanied by furiously sawing strings and bright piccolo embellishments which were most impressive. The fugal finale was well executed with excellent energy. The final epilogue of the seventh movement seemed dwarfed by the climax of the sixth, and uncoordinated “s” sounds became especially noticeable again.

For the audience, it was an incredibly compelling performance. Whether one knew what the texts were or not became unimportant, the music communicated Brahms sentiments directly. 

REVIEW:
Kansas City Symphony
Brahms' German Requiem 
Friday, October 28, 2011
Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
1601 Broadway, Kansas City, MO
For more information visit www.kcsymphony.org

Top Photo: Layla Claire

By Topher Levin

Classical Editor and Contributor

Christopher (Topher) Levin is a composer, pianist, music theorist, and music blogger based in Kansas City, MO. His compositions have been performed at music festivals across the US and in Europe. He has spent two summers in Paris, France studying music at the Ecole Normale de Musique through the EAMA program. His trio for clarinet, piano, and percussion is published in the SCI Journal of Scores.

Topher holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (M.M.) in music theory and (M.M.) in composition and from James Madison University in Virginia (B.M.) in composition. Primary composition teachers have included John S. Hilliard, Paul Rudy, Zhou Long, James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Claude Baker, Narcis Bonet, Michel Merlet, and João Pedro Oliveira. His piano teachers have included Patricia Brady and Karen Kushner. Topher maintains a piano studio of 22 students.

Having recently completed a Master's thesis on the beautiful complexities of Chinary Ung's trio, Spiral I, Topher turned his writing attention to the more informal blogging medium. He has taken to it quite well, sharing posts on strange and wonderful music and art found across the web with a modest but growing number of blog followers. He looks forward to writing for KCM and sharing with its readers the stories of all the amazing musicians performing in Kansas City.

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