Before conquering concert halls with his symphonies, Johannes Brahms made a name for himself as a choral conductor. He led vocal ensembles in his hometown of Hamburg, in Detmold and Vienna, enriching the repertoire with his own music. Composed between 1865 and 1868, Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) is his most extensive choral work and a milestone in his artistic development.

In this work, Brahms combined text passages from the Old and New Testaments in an unconventional way: the ‘target’ of the text and music is no longer the deceased, for whose salvation we pray, but the survivor, who is to be consoled. He thus turned away from ecclesiastical conventions and created a very atypical requiem which has nothing to do with the Catholic Church’s often-set Latin requiem mass. Instead, it was conceived from the outset for the concert hall or church concerts. Musically the Requiem draws from earlier traditions in a highly personal way while remaining firmly in a Romantic choral idiom, at times embedded in lush orchestral textures.

After countless acclaimed recordings devoted to the religious music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan now present their unique vision of Brahms’s masterpiece.