In celebration of Brahms

Not long ago, Brahms was just another name in a list of distant, uninteresting composers whose music appealed to many, but not to me.  Ah, but things change, and the Brahms German Requiem is now among my all time favorites.  I mean all time, and I have spent a fair amount of time on this earth.  The concert April 26 has taken its place among the high points of my long-ish life along with the commencement at Hill Auditorium in 1983, our wedding in the Arboretum on 08/08/80 and the day I got a job offer from Steve Poskanzer in June, 2006.  

Ken, my good friend Kathleen from Michigan and my good friend Dr. Marsha from Delhi were in the full house (well, church) who enjoyed (I hope and think) the concert, which featured a large orchestra (maybe 8 violins, led by the talented Carole Cowan), and the combined Community College Chorale and the Concert Choir.  The GR has 7 movements, and is about the human condition.  It is based in the Bible, but has lessons for us all:  "Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (For all flesh is like the grass)."  I started out loving movement 1, which we sang in the fall, but then moved to enormous enthusiasm about movement 6, the climax ("Tod, wo ist dein Stachel," "Death, where is your sting?"), then came to an appreciation of 2, with its sequentially soft and blasting statements about Fleisch.  Movement 5 also resonated, with its line "...wie einen seine Mutter trostet," "...as one whose mother comforts him."  

I think I knew this piece better than I have in the past, because enjoying performing is all about knowing whatever you are performing.  I focused on Ed Lundergan, our enormously talented conductor.  I listened to Kate, the most talented alto.  I opened my mouth and sang and smiled and loved each of the 90 or so minutes the whole concert took.  At one point, inverting the saying 'from God's mouth to my ear', the sentence appeared full blown in my mind:  I am the luckiest person on this (transitory) earth.  

I hope you all 'rabbit, rabbit-ed' this morning.  Happy May.  The end of the semester and the 2008-2009 academic year.