Saturday 16 November 2019

7.30pm

(ends 9.30pm approximately)

The Apex, Charter Square, Bury St Edmunds

Brahms                  Ein deutsches Requiem

Karl Jenkins          Suite from The Armed Man

Helen Bailey soprano                                   

Tom Asher baritone                         

James Recknell piano                   

Christopher Moore piano

Bury Bach Choir

Philip Reed conductor

This evening we perform two contrasting choral works, one an acknowledged masterpiece, the other a contemporary classic.

Brahms began work on his sublime German Requiem following the death in 1856 of his close friend and fellow composer, Schumann. A notoriously slow and self-critical worker, Brahms only completed it a decade later, after the death of his mother, when he added in tribute to her a movement featuring a soprano soloist. Following the example of the seventeenth-century composer Heinrich Schütz, Brahms chose as the texts for his German Requiem traditional words of comfort for the bereaved from the Lutheran Bible rather than using the Catholic Latin mass. The result is a work that acknowledges personal suffering and grief and attempts to offer consolation. Originally conceived for two soloists, choir and large orchestra, Brahms himself made a transcription of the orchestra’s role for piano, four hands. It is this intimate, chamber music-like account of Brahms’s great score that we perform this evening.

Commissioned for the millennium and dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo crisis, Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man is a powerful and compelling account of the descent into the horrors of war before offering hope for a peaceful future. The work has captured the popular imagination to become one of the most performed and poignant choral works of the moment. We perform the composer’s five-movement choral suite, which distils many of the piece’s most striking elements.

Booking opens 2 September 2019

Tickets £25, £20 and £15 (all seats reserved)

Apex booking fee £1 per ticket

Early booking discout £1 off all tickets booked by 30 September 2019