Valery Gergiev to conduct the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Today, 24 October, will see Valery Gergiev return once again to the conducting stand of the internationally acclaimed Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. At the Berwaldhallen concert hall maestro Gergiev will be conducting one of Johannes Brahms’ greatest works – Ein Deutsches Requiem, the premiere of which was the young composer’s first triumph. For the basis of his immense seven-part oratorio Brahms didn’t take the traditional Latin text of a funereal mass but rather his own version of the sequence of Biblical texts in Luther’s German translation.
The Requiem thus also acquired the description of “German”, though the composer himself would have preferred to call it “Human” − in his work he was addressing all humanity, and not the representatives of one specific confession. By excluding the scenes of the Last Judgement, which occupies a key position in a Catholic funeral mass (it is enough to recall the Requiem of Verdi, Brahms’ contemporary, in which the theme Dies irae is a leitmotif of the entire work), the German composer filled his oratorio with symbols of comfort, hope and love. These are expressed by the soprano and baritone solos, in which the audience at today’s concert will see the acclaimed Swedish singer Ida Falk Winland and leading Mariinsky Opera soloist Alexei Markov.