Widmann and Brahms - by Robert Kirzinger and Richard Dyer, narrated by Eleanor McGourty

Summary: Listen to the concert preview. Eminent Israeli-American pianist Yefim Bronfman joins Andris Nelsons and the BSO in Trauermarsch ("Funeral March") by the German Jörg Widmann, a composer new to the BSO. Writing this concerto-like piece for Bronfman and the Berlin Philharmonic, who premiered it in 2014, Widmann set out deliberately to evoke and engage with music of the Romantic era. A German Requiem, Brahms's largest work, originated with music he wrote following Robert Schumann's attempted suicide in 1854 and seems also to have been connected to the death of the composer's own mother. The result is an utterly personal, scarcely ceremonial Requiem for soprano and baritone soloists, chorus, and orchestra, episodically setting texts chosen by Brahms from the Bible. Its "German"-ness derives partly from the fact that, unlike the traditional Latin Requiem text, Brahms used Martin Luther's German translations of scripture. A German Requiem was the composer's first nearly universal success among his large-scale works, unequivocally fulfilling Schumann's early predictions of Brahms's greatness.