When his mentor Robert Schumann died in 1856, Brahms began sketching a commemorative symphony that never saw the light of day. Nine years later, at the death of his mother, Brahms picked up some strands from that project and started again. No longer a symphony, this music would now become Brahms’s unprecedented and profoundly moving Requiem - a mighty but reassuring work that glows with spiritual comfort rather than hectoring with the threat of impending judgment.
Chief Conductor Edward Gardner leads the orchestra and local choirs through one of Brahms’s most perfectly balanced and consoling creations. But here solemnity follows unbridled joy, as Isabelle Faust joins the orchestra in the concert’s first half to light the fuse on Beethoven’s ebullient, invigorating Violin Concerto.