Brahms to Brandau

Ein Deutsches Requiem and a World Premiere

Event details

Sunday, March 24, 2024
4:00 p.m.

Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre, Count Basie Center for the Arts
99 Monmouth St, Red Bank, NJ

To celebrate our Sparkling 75th Anniversary, Monmouth Civic Chorus returns to Red Bank’s historic Count Basie Center for the Arts for a very special second performance this season. We’ll pair Brahms’s exquisite German Requiem with the world premiere of A Song Together, a work we’ve commissioned from our very own Artistic Director Dr. Ryan James Brandau to mark the occasion. 

The chorus is joined by award-winning soprano Emily Donato and bass-baritone Paul Max Tipton, and elite professional orchestra, for this pair of soul-stirring works. This is your chance to join the worldwide community of Requiem devotees and experience a moment of brand-new beauty all at once. We can’t wait.

Ryan’s free pre-concert talk at 3 p.m. is open to all concert ticket-holders. Please see below for more about the VIP post-concert reception.

Premium seating: Adult $60 • Senior $50 • Student $20 • Group (10+) $40
Regular seating: Adult $40 • Senior $35 • Student $15  • Group (10+) $35

Concert runtime is approximately two hours, including a 15-minute intermission.

Parking in Red Bank is free on Sundays, but there is no dedicated lot at the venue. Please allow plenty of time to find parking and go through security before taking your seats.

Accessibility

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Program

A Song Together – Ryan James Brandau

I. Song of the Universal (Robert E. Kelly, reader)
II. Like Barley Bending (Jacqueline Schreiber, reader)
III. The Arrow and the Song (George Liddy, reader)
IV. A Song Together (Celeste Credle, reader)

Intermission

Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) – Johannes Brahms

I. Selig sind, die da Leid tragen
II. Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras
III. Herr, lehre doch mich (Paul Max Tipton, Baritone)
IV. Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen
V. Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit (Emily Donato, Soprano)
VI. Denn wir haben keine bleibende Statt (Paul Max Tipton, Baritone)
VII. Selig sind die Toten

Texts & translations

A Song Together

“Song of the Universal” – Walt Whitman (“Leaves of Grass”)

Come said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the universal.

In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.

By every life a share or more or less,
None born but is born, conceal’d or unconceal’d the seed is
waiting.

Music is…

“Music is a system of proportion in service of a spiritual impulse.” (George Crumb)
“Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.” (Claude Debussy)
“Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.” (Jean Paul Friedrich Richter)
“Music is life, and like it, inextinguishable.” (Carl Nielsen)
“Where words leave off, music begins.” (Heinrich Heine)

“Like Barley Bending” – Sara Teasdale

Like barley bending
In low fields by the sea,
Singing in hard wind
Ceaselessly;

Like barley bending
And rising again,
So would I, unbroken,
Rise from pain;

So would I softly,
Day long, night long,
Change my sorrow
Into song.

“The Arrow and the Song” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I shot an arrow into the air, 
It fell to earth, I knew not where; 
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight 
Could not follow it in its flight. 

I breathed a song into the air, 
It fell to earth, I knew not where; 
For who has sight so keen and strong, 
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak 
I found the arrow, still unbroke; 
And the song, from beginning to end, 
I found again in the heart of a friend.

“A Song Together” – Carolyn Gratzer Cope, adapted by Ryan James Brandau

A song alone extends its hand
To the very heart of the heart
Caresses, cajoles a mending grace
Unspools its strand from its secret place
A song alone can do this.

But, oh! a song together:
A song together unites the pulse
beats the very heart of our hearts
Turns our ears to each other
Weaves the strands of unique color

Our song together,
Our song as one
beating our hearts,
hearts wound, but voice unbound
From first cry to final breath,
our journey is but a song together.

Let us Sing!
Sing on our journey
Sing as we go
Our way will be more easy
Sing, sing on!

A song together, a song as one.
Close to our hearts,
Close to home in close perfect harmony,
A song together:
sing on, sing on!

“A Song Together” (original text) – Carolyn Gratzer Cope

written for Monmouth Civic Chorus, on the occasion of its 75th anniversary

A song alone
Extends its gentle, cradling hand
To the very heart of the heart
Caresses
Cajoles a gossamer strand
From a secret place
Unspools it
Sets it free
Gracing, offering, mending.
A song alone can do this.

Oh, but a song together!

A song together
Weaves a pulsing, technicolor tapestry
Shatters into fractals
Reassembles, close to perfect
Hearts bound, voices unbound, joy unbounded
Our journey
From the first cry
To the last breath
Is nothing
But a song together.

“A Song Together” end adapted from Virgil:

“Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.”

Meet the artists

Soloists

Soprano Emily Donato, born and based in Brooklyn, NY, enjoys connecting with audiences through performances of music ranging from Baroque to Contemporary works. Most recently, Ms. Donato was awarded first prize in the 2023 Handel Aria Competition, and was a member of the 2023 Virginia Best Adams Quartet at the Carmel Bach Festival.  She made her Carnegie Hall Stern Auditorium debut in May 2023 as the soprano soloist in Bach’s B Minor Mass with the Oratorio Society of NY conducted by Maestro Kent Tritle, and has appeared as a soloist with Voices of Ascension led by Maestro Dennis Keene.

In 2021, she was awarded first prize in the Lyndon-Woodside Oratorio Competition. In 2019 Ms. Donato appeared as a featured soloist in Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass on Yale Schola Cantorum and Juilliard415’s Scandinavian Tour.  Later that year, she performed J.S. Bach’s Cantata 82A Ich Habe Genug with Maestro Masaaki Suzuki and members of Juilliard415 at the celebration of American Friends of Bach Collegium Japan held at the Japanese Ambassador’s residence in New York City. Ms. Donato has also worked with conductors David Hill, Nicholas McGegan, Simon Carrington and Leon Botstein.

Emily is an alumnus of the GRAMMY award winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus, received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Bard College and a Masters in Music from the Yale School of Music, where she was a member of the Yale Voxtet.

MCC members performing

Instrumentalists performing

In Memoriam

Monmouth Civic Chorus honors the memory of our former members who have passed, along with the memories from our donors. We were lucky to have known them all and keep them singing in our hearts.

A huge thanks to our donors

We are deeply grateful for the generous and continuous financial support we receive from our donors. These contributions allow us to organize and hold concerts like this one. Through the Scholarship Fund we have supported many young artists throughout the years.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Annual support

Virtuoso donors

Composer ($1000)

Anonymous (1)
Stephanie & Andrew Bates – in memory of R. Noel Bates and  Paula Hickey
Mary & David Graham – Thank you Dr. Ryan Brandau

Maestro ($500)

Anonymous (1)
Janet & Pete Breslin – in memory of Edythe Kaufman
Deborah Macock – In loving memory of Dwight Macock “A song together, a song as one.”
Carol A. Van Kirk – in memory of my parents Mary & John Van Kirk, Jr.
Kathy Woolston
Hui-Ling & Gordon Wu

Artist ($250)

Anonymous (2)
Richard & Sally Chrisman – in memory of our parents Jud & Margaret Chrisman, Maurice & Sally Weller, our first music teachers
Doug & Doris Clark – in memory of our parents, Barbara & Robert Clark, Madeleine & Kurt Percht
Christine & Wolfgang Elsner – in memory of Nancy Elsner
Anne & Daniel Ford
Ray & Anita Ritchie
Jim Scavone & Paul Chalifour – in memory of Barbara & Emmanuel Scavone and Robert Chalifour

Soloist ($150)

Mary Gilbin & Bob Kelly – in honor of Jerry Metz
Becky & Marshall Gorman
Gerald & Susan Metz
Richard Oppenheim – in loving memory of his stepfather Bill Hoffnung who passed away at age 103 on Valentine’s Day

Musician ($125)

Steve & Patti D’Andrea
Susan Gorsky
Deb & Tom Hoffman – in memory of the Lamp & Hoffman families and John Hogan

Friend ($100)

Anonymous – in honor of Jerry Metz
In memory of Dr. Frederic Ford, with love from the Cope Family
Micele Critelli – in honor of Hillary Critelli
Steve & Patti D’Andrea – in honor of Patti D’Andrea
Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern & Jim Halpern – in honor of Chiara Abreo
Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern & Jim Halpern – in honor of Micaelie Bremer
William Fiorelli – in honor of Jerry Metz
Tom Hoffman – in honor of Deb Hoffman
Kathy Horgan – in honor of Jim Scavone
Greg Kinney – in honor of Joan Kinney

Fan ($25)

Janet Rostad – in memory of Robert Timothy Rostad
Hannah Bates – in honor of Stephanie Bates
Tess Bates – in honor of Stephanie Bates
Caroline Whittemore

Endowment fund

Scholarship fund

Chris Moran
Beatrice Oppenheim – in honor of Richard Oppenheim
Joseph Pisano & Steven Russell
Umami Girl
Leegen & Thomas Wu

RJB’s notes on the program

If he will only point his magic wand to where the powers amassed in the orchestra and chorus lend him its might, yet more wonderful glimpses into the mysteries of the spirit world await us.

Thus predicted Robert Schumann in 1853 about the then twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms. Johannes had impressed Robert and his wife Clara with his piano compositions, and they hoped this talented young man would contribute to the great Beethovenian symphonic tradition of the nineteenth century. Brahms set to work on a symphony around 1855, but it wasn’t until 1876, more than twenty years later, that he managed to emerge completely from the shadow of Beethoven’s Ninth and complete his own symphony. But it wasn’t Brahms’s first symphony that established him on the German musical scene; it was, instead, Ein deutsches Requiem, completed eight years earlier—the longest piece he would ever write. 

Brahms’s Requiem is, ultimately a piece about the passage of time. As Monmouth Civic Chorus looks back over its seventy-five years, and looks forward to the next seventy-five, such a piece is apt. We cherish our many memories of those who were once a living part of this community, whose love of music became a permanent part of the enduring being we call MCC, like the innermost rings of a mighty tree. Trusting in the abiding strength of this institution, we imagine a world seventy-five years on, with new voices filling this hall, new spirits animating our group. 

Brahms’s text for the Requiem is itself a work of art. It is clear from the texts he chose that the work was written not just for his mother, to whom it is dedicated, but also for Brahms himself, and for all who remain and mourn the loss of their loved ones. Rather than set the traditional Latin Requiem texts or even borrow their doomsday imagery, Brahms hand-picked and edited scripture from the well-worn pages of his cherished childhood copy of Luther’s German Bible to create an original textual collage. Brahms’s carefully edited selections give his work broad ecumenical reach. His choices highlight notions of comfort, joy, reassurance, and reward for patience and personal effort while eschewing others, such as judgement, vengeance, religious symbolism, and, notably, the sacrifice of Christ for human sin. Brahms’s use of deutsches (“German”) in the title suggests his reverence for the German literary heritage of the Luther Bible, but as he told Carl Rheinthaler, the chorus master for the premiere, he would have just as happily used menschliches (“human”). While preparing for the premiere, Rheinthaler anxiously admonished the composer: “The work lacks the whole point on which the Christian religion turns, the sacrificial death of Christ.” (Rheinthaler shoehorned into the program a performance of Handel’s “I Know My Redeemer Liveth.”) Brahms responded, “I would dispense with places like John 3:16. I have chosen my texts because I am a musician, and I needed them.” 

Formally, Brahms’s textual selections fashion a focused, rounded arc. The first two movements address not the dead, but living mourners. Where the traditional Latin Requiem opens with a plea for eternal rest for the souls of the departed, Brahms begins with one of the Beatitudes:  “Blessed are they who carry sorrow, for they shall be comforted.” He continues with the assurance from Psalm 126 that “they who sow in tears will reap in joy.” The second movement expands these ideas. A passage from Peter reminds us that all flesh is like grass, and the glory of man is like a flower that withers. Brahms pairs this with a plea for patience, like the farmer who waits for the morning and evening rains to water the fruits of the earth. At the end of the second movement, sorrow again gives way to joy, now everlasting. In the third movement the perspective shifts to the individual, represented by the baritone, contemplating his own destiny. His question, “Now lord, how shall I find comfort?” beckons the chorus’s response: “I hope in you.” Like the second movement, the third ends with a text of assurance. The fourth movement’s text, from Psalm 84, paints a picture of “lovely dwellings” and a state of blessedness. In the fifth, the impact of the first-person, subjective point of view is striking, as it was in the third movement. But where the baritone there announced: “Behold my days are as a handbreadth before Thee, and my life is as nothing,” here the mother-figure soprano assures: “Behold me: I have had a little time for toil and torment and now have found great consolation.” The sixth movement opens with a passage from Hebrews for the chorus, portraying a community wandering in search of its home. As the movement continues, the baritone returns, now as a voice of authority from on high, portending a changed state for our souls. The word Tod (“death”) is uttered for the very first time, but only in the context of its defeat. The seventh and final movement recalls the assurances of the first, but now it is the dead who are blessed, for “they rest from their labors,” and “their works follow after them.” Brahms has thus created an arc: The first three movements deal with the struggle to accept death and the transience of life, the fourth depicts a state of blessedness, and the last three suggest reconciliation to and victory over death. Repetitions of selig (“blessed”) bookend and bind the work together. 

But as Brahms himself wrote, “I have chosen my texts because I am a musician, and I needed them.” All of Brahms’s compositional choices can be understood to elucidate those textual choices. One such choice is that of key. The first and last movements are both in F major, balancing the arc. The second, third, and sixth movements all begin in a minor key and end in the major, underlining their texts’ transitions from sorrow and tears to comfort and joy. In other places, Brahms uses unrelated, distant keys to distinguish an important passage or an entire movement. The second movement opens in the flat-rich gloom of B-flat minor. During that movement’s “be patient” section, Brahms slides into the rare key of G-flat major. Following the extended pedal tone on low D that ends the third movement, the weightless E-flat major that opens the fourth movement sounds worlds away. Brahms manipulates form and proportion to emphasize the theme of assurance. The second, third, and sixth movements end with a fugue, a compositional procedure built from adherence to a central idea. The second movement’s fugue unfolds over thirty-five measures of B-flat, depicting the text’s “everlasting joy.” The third movements ends with a pedal tone on low D that flows unbroken for thirty-six measures while counterpoint churns above it, performing, in a way, the firm faith that “no torment shall touch them.” After evoking the sting of death and the tortures of hell with harmonic tempests, Brahms closes the sixth movement with a hymn of praise in plain old C major whose conspicuously simple fugue subject outlines all of the notes in the C-major scale (“for you have created all things”).  

Much of Brahms’s meaning, and the answer to the text’s central questions about comfort, falls between the lines, in the wordless passages of the orchestra. With the exception of some parts of the fugues, there are few passages in which the orchestra merely doubles the choral parts. Brahms manipulates texture, register, and instrumentation to highlight the difference between dark and light, sorrow and comfort, and other dualities. The opening of the work wraps the ear in the cashmere of violas, cellos, and basses divided into six interweaving lines, with subtle smoothing-over from the horns. The choir enters quietly, without accompaniment, in a stark, haunting response to the string choir. Other statements smolder with the burnished brass alloy glow of trombones. These low, earthy sounds contrast higher, more transparent ones. Brahms introduces the inimitable sound of harps at “they who sow tears,” only to draw us to their jaunty triplets at “shall come with joy.” The altos’ solo delivery in the first movement of“Blessed are they who mourn” is crowned by a glowing halo of flutes, oboes, and solo horn, with no supporting accompaniment. In the second movement, after the somber funeral march, Brahms crafts music of delicious lightness, gently sprinkling raindrops of flutes, harps, and pizzicato strings. Nearly all of the movements end with a high chord sustained by the shimmer of woodwinds. In the third movement, Brahms uses orchestration to illuminate the baritone’s increasing desolation. When he repeats his opening lines (“Lord, let me know that I must have an end”) the sustained string support of his first statement has disintegrated into brittle pizzicato chords, with just the quiet tremor of timpani to connect the dots. The heart of the work—the fourth and fifth movements—stands apart from the rest. In the fourth, marked “with movement,” the fluid triple meter, nudged along by noodling eighth notes, combines with the high entry of the winds in counterpoint with singing cellos to feel like a dance—the gossamer petticoats of Viennese waltzers twirling weightlessly in an otherworldly ballroom, reveling in a state of blessedness. In the fifth movement, the languid pace and iridescent haze of muted, dolce strings transport us to another place entirely. We hear a solo voice—not a baritone but a soprano—spinning out a silken melody in her top register as if in slow motion. At the sixth movement’s depiction of the last trumpet and the ensuing battle with death, Brahms does not disappoint, marshaling a full flex of orchestral muscle from blasting tuba to shrieking piccolo. 

After the triumphant fugue at the end of the sixth movement, Brahms doesn’t ease into lighter, more heavenly music, but instead returns to the starchy orchestral textures of the first three movements. He purposefully connects the first movement and the last. Both open with the same word: “Blessed.” Both share the tonal center of F major. The declamatory alto melody that delivers the words “Blessed are they who mourn” in the first movement returns in the last as “Blessed are the dead.” Thereafter, until the end, there are echos of the first movement, with the woodwinds reprising melodic material directly. There are explicit motivic connections, too. The three-note motive with which the sopranos begin the entire work is outlined by the basses and cellos in the first three notes of the last movement, and at their entry, the sopranos sing the same pattern in mirror image. The same motive turns up in other guises throughout the entire work. On the large scale, the Requiem rises toward the fourth movement, then arcs back down to its close at the end of the seventh. On the small scale, too, Brahms continually evokes ups and downs. The opening melody of the cellos and violas at the top of the work rises a few steps but then falls, its feet mired in the weight of the harmonic clay. The somber chant melody of the second movement rises just enough to feel like it’s getting somewhere, but then collapses on itself, withering like the blooms on the grass. But elsewhere, Brahms inserts signs of hope: At the very end of the work the harp, silent since halfway through the second movement, dramatically re-enters, rolling from the bottom of its range to the top. Though fronted by the heaven-bound harp, the instrumentation here bears Brahms’s characteristic balanced registration: The woodwinds provide their customary high chord but the trombones keep one foot on the ground. Both the dead and the living are represented in this final moment. Is Brahms implying that comfort is an escape to heaven? Is he providing a vision of the resurrection, from Revelation? Is he merely trying to lead us from dark, burdened sounds to something lighter? He doesn’t give it text; while the choir murmurs “blessed, blessed,” Brahms leaves that determination to the ears and hearts of the individual listener.  

Any encounter with a composer’s “glimpse into the mysteries of the spirit world” is refracted through the lens of our current world context and tinted by our own emotional filters. Beyond the simple sensory pleasure of hearing beautiful sounds, we each experience music through our own particular lenses and filters. Pieces as layered and profound as Ein deutsches Requiem have a way of revealing to us that in fact we needed something more, or something different, from what we anticipated. 

At the time he composed the Requiem, Brahms needed to experience and process his own grief, and to look for some hope beyond it. In Brahms’s own time, “progress” was being reconciled with the cyclical rhythms of agrarian life. A few weeks after his mother died, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann: “Time changes everything for better or worse . . . It does not so much change as it builds up and develops, and thus when once this sad year is over I shall begin to miss my dear good mother ever more and more.” The genius of Brahms’s Requiem, for me, is the way it ends almost where it began, and in between offers music that can meet each of us wherever we happen to be. It gently resists frightening us with operatic depictions of medieval judgment or sedating us with palliative visions of an imagined  paradise. Just as each day has its ups and downs, each month its good days and its bad, and each year its high season and its off season, within each movement of the Requiem, sorrow dances with comfort, tears mingle with joy, the transient withers while the everlasting abides. 

In this moment of celebration, I can’t help but marvel at the strength and endurance of an institution such as Monmouth Civic Chorus. Like a several-thousand year-old sequoia, this lasting institution began as a simple seed. Drawing on the resources of the earthy community where it took root, flowering each season with a series of beautiful concerts, working week-in and week-out to transform the air of its singers’ breath into something worthy of contemplation, growing year-over-year towards its North-Star sun—a love of music—it has flourished, through seventy-five fabulous, frantic years. Just before Brahms put pen to paper to create his 

masterpiece, an ocean away a melancholic but ultimately hopeful politician perfectly encapsulated what I hear Brahms’s words and music saying to me. Abraham Lincoln, in a speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural society in 1859, after extolling the virtues of steam power and consoling farmers facing disappointing yields, shared this:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Reflecting on MCC’s anniversary, I challenge anyone to find an institution that more admirably embodies Lincoln’s hope—that there are communities where individuals come together in common cause for the sake of something greater than themselves that endures, thrives, delights, and serves as a beacon for the good we can to, with a song, together. 

Acknowledgements

Thank you our outstanding rehearsal pianist Holland Jancaitis, and to Printing2Go for providing exceptional service at every turn. You make our season possible.

For the press

You can download a PDF of the press release for this event here.