Event

Johannes Brahms: "A German Requiem," 1st Movement

Arrangement for chamber ensemble by Lea Wolpert (2012)

(Live recording, Peterskirche Heidelberg 2016)

SCHOLA HEIDELBERG, ensemble aisthesis, cond. Walter Nußbaum

"Can – indeed, should – one ‘scale down’ such a significant, magnificent work?” – I found myself faced with this question when, after a performance of Schoenberg’s Op. 8 (Orchestral Songs) and Zemlinsky’s Op. 13 at the University of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover, they approached me with great enthusiasm and asked me to arrange and perform the Brahms Requiem in the spirit of Schoenberg – just as the Vienna Circle had arranged many great works by Mahler, Bruckner, etc., for small chamber ensembles so that they could get to know these works in detail and also express them in a chamber music context.
I was highly skeptical, but in the end I was persuaded by "pedagogical considerations." The result is anything but a pedagogical solution, as the chamber-music instrumentation offers, under certain circumstances, quite different possibilities than an orchestral ensemble. Timbral nuances, nuanced agogics, refined articulations – everything that chamber music offers can be realized here with incredible flexibility. From the outset, the original score and the autograph were also incorporated into the work; many details were measured against and verified using Brahms’s first edition and the autograph, as were Brahms’s original metronome markings, which still appeared in the first edition of the score but were omitted in later editions. After the arrangement, which took the entire 2012 summer semester to complete with the intensive collaboration of my music theory colleague Prof. Martin Messmer, was finalized, we premiered the arrangement at the end of that working phase. The work has since been performed on several occasions, and improvements have been made after each performance. I would like to extend my special thanks to Britta Giesecke von Bergh and Christof Pannes for their editorial work in preparing the sheet music. The performances proved so successful that we have no hesitation in presenting this edition as the definitive version for a smaller ensemble and are hereby releasing a live recording of the public concert held on November 13, 2016, at Peterskirche in Heidelberg.

Walter Nußbaum

You can find Episode 2 of "ENCORE-digital" from last week here.