Brahms Requiem

Inspired by the death of his mother, Brahms’s tender, consoling A German Requiem couldn’t be further from Verdi’s and Berlioz’s settings of the standard Latin Mass text. It’s the first of three Requiems this season marking 100 years since the end of the First World War. Richard Farnes makes his Proms debut directing the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with soloists Golda Schultz and Johan Reuter. Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising (marking the composer’s 90th birthday this year) also traces a journey from darkness to light, enacting the conflict both spatially and musically in some of the composer’s most dramatic writing.