Published
Ein Deutsches Barockrequiem
Because Lutherans do not have a fixed funeral service, Brahms selected texts from various Biblical sources for his German Requiem. Resident artists Vox Luminis trace a path from those texts to some of the familiar and less-familiar pages of their core repertoire, works that set to music exactly the same texts that Brahms selected.
Johannes Brahms drew texts from various Biblical sources for hisDeutsches Requiem. As we hear in his choral music, he had a passion for polyphony and was inspired by models from the great Lutheran tradition of the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Ricercar and Vox Luminis have explored this early repertoire with the same passion for many years now, although with no less admiration for Brahms’s masterpiece. It is no surprise that some of the texts that Brahms chose had already been set by his illustrious predecessors; it simply remained for us to trace a path through these earlier scores, so many meditations on death, and to assemble a very different Deutsches Requiem: one animated by the emotions of the Lutheran Baroque. Our new recording thus brings together motets the likes of Christian Geist, Johann Philipp Förtsch, Andreas Hammerschmidt and Johann Hermann Schein.