Brahms’ A German Requiem is unique in the family of great requiems, in part because it doesn’t neatly fit into the family rules of order or lineage. Brahms' moving work, putatively penned in response to the deaths of his friend Robert Schumann and his mother, steers clear of the standard Latin text of the requiem form, instead drawing on various Biblical sources from both testaments and written in German.
The last time we heard Brahms’ masterpiece — possibly his greatest — in town, before the Santa Barbara Symphony’s (SBS) performance last weekend, the Santa Barbara Choral Society (SBCS) gave a memorable rendering in the First Presbyterian Church in 2017, a sacred setting which seemed to enhance the spiritual resonance of the score. With the Symphony’s performance, the connotation shifted in the opposite, secularizing direction, mostly because of a bizarre, jukebox-ing effect of interrupting the requiem’s all-important epic contouring with irrelevant Mahler songs within Brahms' perfectly-stitched structure.
