The Russian National Orchestra and Alexander Rudin opened the season with “German Requiem”

The Russian National Orchestra (RNO), under the direction of its new artistic director Alexander Rudin, together with the Intrada choir and guest soloists Albina Latipova and Vladislav Sulimsky, held the first concert of its own philharmonic subscription. Brahms’ “German Requiem” was performed on the stage of the Tchaikovsky Hall – music as desperate as it was comforting. Tells Yulia Bederova.

“Joy, consolation, hope” – this is how Rudin explained the meaning of his relationship with music in a recent interview with Kommersant (see Kommersant on August 2), however, then they were talking about Haydn, to whom a significant part of Rudin’s future season is devoted. But these words also apply to the “German Requiem” with RNO without stretching it. Another thing is that with joy in Brahms’s score, as indeed in his work in general, the situation is not easy. After all, here the composer directly appeals to the spiritual and artistic traditions of the funeral mass, and mixes traces of the Latin (implicitly) and Protestant (overtly) versions of the theme. “German Requiem” sounds like a requiem and looks like a requiem, although, written on selected lines of Luther’s translation of the Bible, it is not in the strict sense a requiem as a Catholic liturgical genre.

Be that as it may, constructively inventive, infused with song and choral intonations and equipped with quasi-baroque polyphonic episodes, the “German Requiem” is usually called “a requiem not about death, but about life.” Whether this is true or not is a controversial issue. Even though this large-scale work for orchestra, choir and two soloists, written in the 1860s by essentially a young man who never wrote another opera, is performed quite regularly. In Russia alone, in the foreseeable past, almost all notable conductors, from Valery Gergiev to Teodor Currentzis and Mikhail Pletnev, gave their sometimes life-affirming, sometimes mournful answers to Brahms’s question.

Alexander Rudin, a rare connoisseur of musical rarities, often belonging, surprisingly, to the most textbook schools and eras, choosing this time music known (including to the orchestra), emphasized continuity and approached the solution of the Brahms riddle with all, if not pioneering, then research caution. The new performing version of the “German Requiem” seems to be devoted not so much to an investigation of the national-supra-confessional foundations of the score (was Brahms religious and what does his musical “Germanness” mean) as to its simple and at the same time whimsical sound weaving, collecting chorale, fugue , song, opera, symphonic themes and textures in a series of crystal-strict vocal and instrumental intermezzos. But not only.

Extremely careful attention to the form without dynamic hyperbole, to the fragmentation and polysemy of the text, to its general structure and nuances, meaning and sound, to the emotional and melodic pattern in Rudin’s performance with “Intrada” and RNO makes the cycle a distant relative of not even masses, passions or classical-romantic oratorios – rather a descendant of Bach’s cantatas and chorale preludes. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” – the chorus in the first movement begins the conversation with that clearly focused chamber personality with which solo arias can sound in cantatas. And the complex connection of words, intonations and instrumental lines continuing the choral cues (the flute, oboe and strings seem to accurately hear the text at the level of timbres) suggests that the large-scale cantata-symphonic puzzle, originally from the romantic era, has a chamber-ensemble solution. The orchestra seems to be finishing the phrases of the text, highlighting the details with careful vocal articulation, and the choir (that’s why Intrada was there, so that with listened and accurate diction and phrasing it would not force the sound) strictly adheres to the instrumental rules.

“I want to write sacred music not for a house of worship, but for cheerful people,” wrote Schumann, Brahms’ mentor, in 1843. True, later he reasoned a little more strictly: his “Missa sacra” is intended for both concert and church occasions. In this sense, Brahms, with discouraging courage, picks up and continues Schumann’s ideas, but writes rather not for cheerful people, but for crying people, lighting up for them the light of old and new music, old and new thoughts about consolation and hope. And he conveys these thoughts in his own language, at the same time sullenly stern (as in fugues, according to Schumann’s definition, the most profound of musical forms) and lyrically intonated, as in songs.

A little more operaticism than a song cycle, a polyphonic form or a chamber cantata would suggest, sounded in the third movement (“Tell me, Lord, my death”), where baritone Vladislav Sulimsky, with his Italian repertoire baggage interspersed with German parts, seemed to be a little cramped . A little less dramatic volume, but more brightness sounded in Albina Latipova’s voice – the Mozartian light bel canto in the fifth movement (“So now you too have sadness”) clarified the gloomy Brahmsian atmosphere, echoing the transparency that Rudin, the orchestra and the choir found in weighty and scary, as sometimes happens, the second part of the “Requiem” (“For all flesh is like grass”). Here it became something like a dance, elegantly ceremonious and homely simple at the same time, with flying counterpoint of long choral lines.

In the new performance, it was wonderful to hear how semantic and sound arches were built from melodies and textures. And how all the beauty of the mirror form of the choir and orchestra exists as if only for the sake of serving as a weighty basis for careful, in essence, very Protestant in spirit musical work. This work by Rudin and RNO, it seems, was equally grateful both in familiar details and in unexpected discoveries, as in the final part, at the same time the most hopeless and the most comforting. And he turned sensitive music into the score equivalent of Luther’s reasoning: “No Christian should at the end of his days think that he is alone on his deathbed. He must be absolutely sure that many eyes are watching him: the Lord Himself, in addition, angels, saints and all Christians. <...> You can’t die. This is evidenced by Elisha saying to the servant: “Do not be afraid, they are more with us than with them,” although their enemies surrounded them and they saw no one but their enemies around.”