Houston Chamber Choir honors area medical professionals Saturday
Grief-stricken by the loss of his mother, Johannes Brahms had a quietly revolutionary idea: he would create a requiem, which by the 1860s was practically required for any serious composer, but turn the form on its ear by honoring the living rather than the dead.
Thus was born “A German Requiem,” for which Brahms drew upon the Lutheran Bible as well as the inspirations of Bach, Beethoven, and his mentor Robert Schumann. Seeking to honor the researchers and medical professionals who have put their lives on the line to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, Houston Chamber Choir founder and artistic director Robert Simpson decided to use the requiem as the centerpiece of Saturday’s “To Bring Comfort” concert, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. at South Main Baptist Church.
It was a natural fit, he explains.
“[Brahms] put the living first in his mind, and much of what we sing about is, in one way or another, offering context and comfort for those who have been left behind,” Simpson says.
The piece’s nonjudgmental, palliative tone felt appropriate when reckoning with a disease that has now claimed more than 70,000 Texans’ lives, he adds. He found a kind of symmetry with the Biblical passages Brahms used as his text, such as Matthew 5:4 — “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted” — or, from Psalm 126, “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.”
Houston Chamber Choir: To Bring Comfort
When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 6
Where: South Main Baptist Church, 4100 Main St.
Details: $25; 713-224-5566; houstonchamberchoir.org
“As we go forward now as those who have lived through this, we are left to make sense out of what has happened,” Simpson says, “and to make peace with it as well.”
The choir will be joined by soprano Cynthia Clayton and baritone Héctor Vásquez, both faculty members at UH’s Moores School of Music. The accompanists, Shepherd School of Music professor Brian Connelly and Juilliard/Shepherd School grad Yvonne Chen, will be using a four-hand piano arrangement written by Brahms himself. Simpson believes the choice of instrument — Connelly’s 19th-century Bösendorfer grand, boasting vintage features like leather-covered hammers — will heighten the requiem’s feeling of intimacy even further.
“There’s a transparency and a gentleness to this sound that we wouldn’t be able to acquire even with a modern piano,” he says. “It’s not just that we’re using piano accompaniment, but we’re using this 19th-century piano that is similar to a piano that Brahms might have used or owned. This is a sound that is very much part of the Brahms sound-world.”
The concert, which will also be available online after Nov. 21, will open with the premiere of “Hymn for Strength.” Simpson asked his friend J. Todd Frazier, director of Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine, to write a companion piece to the Brahms. An Eastman-trained composer himself, Frazier in turn asked current Houston poet laureate Outspoken Bean to serve as lyricist.
M.J. Gallop, founding director of Methodist employee choir Houston Methodist Singers, will conduct the piece, which the chamber choir will perform alongside a community choir of professionals from throughout the Texas Medical Center. Although designed for singers of “modest” abilities, Simpson notes, the hymn’s message of healing and comfort lends it considerable potency.
“It has much more going on than you’d normally think of a church hymn,” he says. “The melody repeats, and there is a growing sense of energy as we go into the final movement.”
With so many people grieving the loss of loved ones to COVID-19, and countless others struggling to process the pandemic’s wide-ranging fallout, Simpson hopes Saturday’s performance will prompt listeners to reflect on how Bean’s lyrics — but especially the double meaning of the refrain, “I cannot go without your love” — might apply to their own lives.
The entire piece, he explains, amounts to a “community-wide expression of our admiration and thanks for those in the medical field, but it’s also a way for us to experience the power that both medicine and music have: healing the body and healing the soul.
“Those two [ideas] come together as we see these medical professionals and chamber choir singers all singing together, each bringing their own special healing to that moment,” Simpson adds. “To me, it’s going to be one of the moments I’ll always remember, I know.”
Chris Gray is a Houston-based correspondent