Washington Classical Review

Steven Fox conducted soprano Katerina Burton and the Cathedral Choral Society and Orchestra in Brahms’ German Requiem Sunday afternoon. Photo: Erin Haar

Sunlight puts on quite a show in the late afternoon at Washington National Cathedral, around the time that Evensong would begin. Instead of that liturgical service on Sunday, Steven Fox conducted the Cathedral Choral Society and Orchestra in a sweeping, romantic reading of Ein deutsches Requiem by Johannes Brahms. It proved an elegiac opening to the esteemed chorus’s season, gold-tinged music that mirrored the glowing light.

Before the orchestra took their seats on the platform under the cathedral’s crossing, Fox conducted his singers, all six score of them, in a much smaller piece. Brahms conceived his Geistliches Lied as a counterpoint exercise, part of an exchange he had with violinist Joseph Joachim in 1856. Fitted with a consoling poem by Paul Flemming, this little motet made a fine introduction to the main event. The huge number of singers provided thrilling crescendi, but Fox guided them through sensitive dynamic phrasing as well.

Like the Geistliches Lied, the German Requiem is not a liturgical piece. Brahms, likely moved by the death of his mother in 1865, adapted his own selection of texts from Luther’s German Bible, even later refusing to add any text specific to the saving sacrifice of Christ. In addition to his mother’s passing, the 1856 death of his mentor, Robert Schumann, likely also weighed on Brahms’ mind. In the Requiem’s second movement, Brahms reused some previously abandoned music from 1854, the year of Schumann’s attempted suicide.

Brahms had spent parts of his career conducting choruses, including the celebrated Wiener Singakademie, just shortly before he began work on the German Requiem. The choir is the undisputed star of the work, and Brahms wrote for it with authority and awareness of its strengths. After a warm opening to the first movement from the orchestra, with the violin section relegated to silence by the score, the Cathedral Choral Society displayed its greatest strength, a potent, room-filling sound made by all those amassed voices.

Fox took the second movement, music reminiscent of a funeral march in some ways, at just the right tempo, not too fast and with expertly paced intensification into the loud sections. The singers declaimed the text with incisive clarity, and the final chords of sections resonated in the stone nave with a long hanging presence, sadly interrupted all too often by unneeded applause between movements.

Baritone Trevor Scheunemann, an alumnus of Washington National Opera’s young artists program with a long history in the city, sang the solo parts in the third and sixth movements with prophetic force, up to a puissant high F. Fox and his singer did not always agree on the tempo in these movements, leading to a few minor ensemble mishaps in lining up with the orchestra and chorus, all quickly resolved.

The highlight of the experience came in the fifth movement, where Katerina Burton had an incandescent turn in the piece’s lone soprano solo. A late addition to the Requiem, this movement features the composer’s most overt tribute to his late mother. Burton soared with a cushioned, floating tone above the delicately scored orchestra and chorus, blossoming on a limpid high A in the piece’s opening phrase. Fox took this poignant movement at a gently flowing tempo, luxuriating in Burton’s power and breath support. Her closing lines (“I will see you again”) glowed with maternal warmth.

Fox kept the overall timing of the piece, the longest work Brahms ever composed, just under 70 minutes by moving the tempo forward in the last two movements. This prevented the opening section of the sixth movement from evoking the plodding sense of a weary journey. The angry outbursts in the middle of the movement evoke the terror of the Last Judgment, using some of the same texts Handel used for the end of Messiah. Fox’s rushed tempo revealed the liability of such a large chorus, which is that it cannot be as nimble as a smaller group in fast passages.

Some prominent sour notes in the horns, around the middle of the last movement, were the only notable flaw in what remained overall a solid performance. Fox’s insistence on urging this music forward too much worked against the score, which is marked Feierlich (Solemnly), and which should revisit the calm of the opening movement, now blessing those who have died along with those who mourn them. No one could have complained of taking a few more minutes to savor that idea in the fading sunbeams.

Cathedral Choral Society presents a program of Christmas music December 14 and 15. cathedralchoralsociety.org