Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem album review
Edward Gardner and his Bergen Philharmonic forces offer a detailed, considered performance of Brahms's humanist masterpiece. Tempos are steady and sombre, the playing full of warmth, and there are heartfelt vocal solos from Johanna Wallroth and Brian Mulligan. The tone in the first movement is beautifully dark, the lower strings (the violins are silent in this movement) taking the music down into a velvety blackness, the wind soloists lavishing care on every line. It's a highly promising start. Yet while the attention to detail continues, so does the carefulness, and the latter is perhaps too dominant. The work's sense of consolation is captured more convincingly than its suggestion of release: the culmination of the penultimate movement loses its joyous momentum and remains earthbound.
That said, there's much to enjoy. Mulligan's baritone solo in the third movement conveys tension and desperation while still sounding beautiful, and is answered by choral singing that's impressively agile and secure of pitch. However, although the large choral forces comprise three massed choirs, one isn't often struck by their power: there's not much space in the recorded sound between voices and orchestra, leaving the chorus feeling a little far back in the mix. The result is that, Mulligan excepted, the words don't leap out quite as they should in this of all Requiems.
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