Oramo conducts Brahms

Still waters run deep: Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Chorus perform Brahms’s German Requiem, plus two emotionally-charged rediscoveries from postwar Finland.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”. Johannes Brahms was not a believer, and as he composed his German Requiem, he set out to console and comfort the living. The result is one of the most beautiful, most moving and – in its own way - most profoundly spiritual choral works of the 19th century. The BBC Symphony Chorus sings it today, and Sakari Oramo conducts.

But there’s more than one way to tell any story, and Oramo has chosen to introduce Brahms’s masterpiece with two songs of protest and loss from his native Finland. In Requiem for Our Time, the late Einojuhani Rautavaara mourns his mother with drums and trumpets, while Aulis Sallinen chips away at the Berlin Wall in music of quiet but implacable power. The accent is unfamiliar, but the emotion is universal.