For our first ever concert in Binham Priory the choir, directed by David Ballard, will perform Johannes Brahms' Ein Deutches Requiem, Im Abendrot by Richard Strauss and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Five Mystical Songs.
Written between 1865 and 1868, Ein Deutsches Requiem is sacred but non-liturgical and, unlike a long tradition of the Latin Requiem, Ein Deutsches Requiem, as its title states, is set in the German language. It may well have been inspired by the recent death of Brahms' mother. Tonight’s performance is in a version accompanied by 4 handed piano, written by Brahms himself.
Written between 1906 and 1911, Five Mystical Songs sets four poems by seventeenth-century Welsh poet and Anglican priest George Herbert. The work received its first performance on 14 September 1911, at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester with Vaughan Williams himself conducting.
Im Abendrot (At Sunset) is one of the Four Last Songs written by Richard Strauss in 1948 at the age of 84. Universally considered among the composer’s most beautiful, profound, and human works, Strauss’s Four Last Songs were among his last compositions and served as a final love letter to his wife of nearly 60 years, the soprano Pauline de Ahna.The title was provided posthumously by Strauss’s friend Ernst Roth, who published the four songs as a single unit in 1950.
We are delighted to be joined by Alexandra Bryant: soprano, Robert Gildon: baritone and
Elizabeth Stacey and John Stephens as our pianists.