Johannes Brahms
             Sacred Choral Music

* Two Motets, op. 74
* Fest- und Gedenksprueche, op. 109
* Three Motets, op. 110
* Missa Canonica, op. posth.
* Two Motets, op. 29

RIAS Chamber Choir/Marcus Creed
Harmonia Mundi HMC901591 Total time: 60:51

Summary for the Busy Executive: Technically dazzling.

Brahms's chamber and symphonic music has long since triumphed in
the concert hall.  It's difficult to think of him as an unknown
quantity.  Nevertheless, outside of perhaps four pieces - Ein deutsches
Requiem, the two sets of Liebeslieder-Walzer, and to a lesser extent the
Alt-Rhapsodie and Schicksalslied - people have little idea of the wealth
of choral music Brahms left behind.  He wrote it throughout his career,
some in connection with various choir-director jobs, others to specific
commissions or occasions, and still others just because he wanted to.
His choral music covers a huge span of emotion and function.  As you
would expect, he wrote almost all of it to a very high standard indeed.

In my mind, Brahms's motets are the best since Bach, with some actually
as good as Bach.  Certainly, Bach more than anyone else influenced their
composition.  For some reason, early on, Brahms felt the need to acquire
a thorough knowledge of and facility with counterpoint.  He spent about
a year of rigorous self-study fooling around with canons, fugues,
invertible counterpoint, and so on.  To a great extent, he hides the
"academic" use of counterpoint in his chamber and symphonic music,
although he trots it out for special occasions in places like the
passacaglia peroration of the Haydn Variations.  Indeed, because of the
usual absence of the traditional forms, most don't think of him as the
contrapuntal genius he undoubtedly is.  However, if one regards contrapuntal
facility as the ability to maintain several planes of thematic activity
simultaneously, then almost all of Brahms's music shows this.  The
difference between Brahms's counterpoint and Bach's comes down to, not
quality, but their different effects.  For Bach, counterpoint intensifies
rhythm and the sense of dance.  For Brahms, counterpoint typically
emphasizes singing.  I can recall no better example than the little-known
Geistliches Lied, op.  30, for choir and organ, which sounds like a
Mendelssohnian song without words and is in reality a double canon at
the ninth with a free accompaniment.  The motets, however, represent the
zenith of Brahms's contrapuntal art.  But it's not all counterpoint.
Technique serves expression.  These works plunge deep into the heart.
But they wouldn't strike quite so deep without a strong appeal to the
head as well.  Almost everything on this CD is The Best Thing Brahms
Ever Wrote.

The op.  29 motets - "Es ist das Heil uns kommen her" ("our salvation
has come to us") and "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" ("create
in me, God, a pure heart") - seem based on two Bach types.  "Es ist das
Heil" represents the strophic variation of a chorale tune, like Bach's
"Jesu, meine Freude" ("Jesus, my joy"), while "Schaffe in mir" is
thematically free, although even more rigorously and sophisticatedly
fashioned, similar in that sense to Bach's "Singet dem Herrn ein neues
Lied" ("sing to the Lord a new song").  "Es ist das Heil" follows a
statement of the chorale with a fugue in which not only the subject
derives from the chorale tune, but a cantus firmus bass actually restates
the tune, in a procedure strikingly reminiscent of the opening chorus
to Bach's Easter Cantata No.  4 "Christ lag in Todesbanden" ("Christ lay
in the bonds of death").  "Schaffe in mir" ratchets up both the contrapuntal
skill (Brahms wrote it about a year later) and the expressive power.
Most listeners probably won't be aware of the counterpoint until the
fugues, the first pleading for mercy, the second praising God's infinite
love.  Nevertheless, the opening choral statement, which sounds like a
straightforward chorale, nevertheless features, if you dig, a canon in
augmentation between the sopranos and the basses.  The second movement,
in contrast, is an obvious fugue, bristling with stretto to powerful
effect.  Brahms this follows this with a movement easily mistaken for
simple Romantic pastoralism - in fact, a canon at the nudnik interval
of the seventh among the voices.

The Missa Canonica is probably the earliest composition on the CD
(somewhere around 1856) and was part of his self-study.  Indeed, as
far as I know, it's the only excercise from that period to have survived.
Brahms periodically destroyed early sketches and notes.  He didn't
complete more than three movements: a Sanctus, a Benedictus, and an Agnus
Dei.  He recycled some of it into op.  74 (1863-1878).  A whiff of
exercise hangs over the Mass, particularly over the Sanctus, and the
title of the work slightly misleads.  One finds not only canons but a
fugue (at the beginning of the Agnus Dei).  Much of this is beautiful
indeed, but the later incarnation of the material in the first motet of
op.  74, "Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Muehseligen" ("why is the light
given to those weary in spirit") surpasses the mass.  It's as if we watch
the flowering of a bare branch. To some extent, the opening movement
reminds me of Bach's Cantata No.  21 "Ich hatte viel Bekuemmernis" ("I
had much care"), with a declamatory opening followed by a fugue. The
fugue elaborates the Agnus Dei fugue of the Mass.  Its highly chromatic
subject twists and corkscrews its way asking the tormented question (in
the words of Oscar Hammerstein II) "why was I born?" But the real genius
of the thing lies in Brahms's provision of a dramatic context for the
fugues by the simplest of devices: the periodic choral cry "Warum?"
("why?"), one chord per syllable, again similar to Bach in Cantata No.
21 as well as to the anguished repeated cries of "komm" in the Bach motet
"Komm, Jesu, komm." The Benedictus canon at, I think, the second appears
in even more elaborate dress, and the work ends with a chorale harmonization
of "Mit Fried und Freud" ("with peace and joy").

The second motet of op.  74, "O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf" ("O Savior,
throw the heavens open"), is mini but mighty.  A chorale tune in Dorian
mode is fragmented and turned in on itself.  It's like watching a flock
of birds suddenly diving at various times.  Again, the musical model
seems Bach's Cantata No.  4, but Brahms's counterpoint here outshines
Bach's.  Believe it, that realization shocks even me.  Though highly
filigreed, the Bach pattern of imitation is more regular.  Brahms, on
the other hand, lights a Roman candle of imitation: one bright explosion
after another, and you can never anticipate when or of what.  Again, we
get variations on the chorale tune for each movement.  The main device
is canon - in the third movement, double canon at the fourth, and in the
last movement, the parts entering closer and closer together.

The three Fest- und Gedenkspruche (almost untranslatable; "festival
mottos" or "proverbs" gives some idea) came about as a kind of thank-you
note to Hamburg for conferring on him the honorary freedom of the city
in 1889.  Unlike the motets, it celebrates rather than meditates.  In
general, the emotional tone is less complex and less dark.  Here, Brahms
experiments with double choir, following Bach in the motets "Singet dem
Herrn" and "Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf" ("the Holy Spirit
helps our weakness"), as well as certain motets of Renaissance composer
Heinrich Schuetz.  It's not all that far-fetched.  Brahms personally
owned a lot of music, particularly music before Mozart and Haydn.
Like many Romantics, Brahms had a taste for the antiquarian and a
strong interest in early German music.  He probably had as much personal
acquaintance with early music as nearly anyone of his time.  In the
first movement, one choir hands off to another.  In the second, we begin
with much the same, with greater overlap.  At the word "aber" ("but"),
declaimed by both choirs, Brahms steals Bach's dramatic trick from Cantata
No.  21 of changing the texture to something more integratedly imitative.
Gradually and imperceptibly, he moves back to the alternation.  In the
third, the alternation occurs at first mainly between upper and lower
voices but in its middle section moves back to handoffs from one choir
to another.  By Brahms's standard so far, this is almost relaxed music.
Forget the technique for a moment, however, and you have a beautiful,
rousing, highly expressive set. The second movement with its fanfare-like
ideas puts me in mind of the Renaissance "tower music," and the third
gives the listener a warm hug.  Thanks indeed.

Brahms finished off his sacred choral music with the op.  110 motets,
another trilogy.  Like much of his late work, it's music relatively
stripped to bone and sinew.  The counterpoint isn't so openly virtuosic
or exuberant, and the psychology comes from the same dark woods as the
Four Serious Songs and the fourth symphony.  The technique doesn't
call attention to itself but almost entirely serves expression.  Don't,
however, let the music fool you into thinking this is lesser technique.
Brahms has mastered composition to such an extent, he can afford not to
consciously consider his craft.  At least, the music leaves you with
that impression: that the music has made its way from within to the page
without a hitch. The part-writing doesn't follow the usual paths - not
even Brahms's usual paths - and yet the music sounds full, rather than
scrambling or scrappy.  The first motet, "Ich aber bin elend" ("but I
am wretched"), contrasts biting dissonances and chromaticism with a
gorgeous, radiant prayer for deliverance.  The second, "Ach, arme Welt"
("alas, poor world") begins as a chorale setting, but a careful listen
reveals that the old contrapuntal devices have crept in here and there.
Brahms doesn't apply them strictly.  He uses them in order to illuminate
certain phrases of the text.  Brahms crowns the set with "Wenn wir in
hoechsten Noeten sein" ("when we are in deepest need"), more double-choir
writing and more openly imitative.  The chromaticism is also at its most
extreme.  The motet ends with the two main ideas - an ascending chromatic
line and a more heroic, strongly-rhythmic pattern - combining as the
text gives thanks for God's love.

Brahms didn't make things easy either for his singers or for the choir
director.  Due to a misconception general at the time (perhaps even
universal) about the Bach motets, Brahms created his works for a cappella
chorus.  Scholars today generally agree that in Bach's motets, instruments
doubled voices.  An instrumental accompaniment doesn't necessarily make
Bach's motets any easier, but it does bring up a different set of problems.
With Brahms, however, the problem is twofold.  The choir has to have the
chops - not only a strong sound (demanded by a Romantic choral style)
and superb intonation (demanded by the extremely chromatic harmony) but
also, because of the counterpoint, the ability to clarify texture.
Interpretively, the motets - especially "Schaffe," "O Heiland," "Warum,"
and op.  110 - require a conductor with symphonic smarts.  This is merely
what performers must bring to the table to have any chance of success
at all.  These works don't forgive game tries.

Marcus Creed's RIAS Chamber Choir is simply one of the finest in the
world.  Their choral technique is faultless: diction is crisp, attacks
and rhythms of Cleveland Orchestra caliber, and intonation dead on.
I may quibble with Creed's tempi for this or that movement, but, more
important, Creed gives you a sense of the whole.  He not only keeps
things moving, he lets the listener "ride" the musical argument from
here to there.  The choir not only crescendos, it does the far more
difficult job of gradually getting softer.  This allows Creed to shape
each movement with great subtlety.  Furthermore, the choir's counterpoint
is so clear, you could, if so inclined, lecture from the recording.

All that said, I must confess my affection for the account of the motets
from Richard Marlow and the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge (Conifer
CDCF178, n.  l.  a.).  The RIAS Chamber Choir beats them by a few whiskers
in the matter of technique, and Creed delineates the architecture better
than Marlow.  But the Trinitarians imbue this music with a humane warmth
largely missing from the Germans.  I would describe Marlow's account as
amiable and loving.  The Germans come across as very Protestant, very
stern.  I wouldn't take one over the other, and each group more or less
comments on the other.  It's the difference between the Beethoven
symphonies by Walter and by Szell.

Still, Creed has delivered an outstanding disc of the hardest choral
repertoire I can think of.  Last time I looked, BMG Music Service had
it available (BMG catalogue number: D118164).  You might wait for a sale.
Or you might just give in now.

Steve Schwartz