Rites of consolation: Finnish and German requiems in illuminating combination

The German Requiem used to fill a concert programme, sufficient unto itself. Modern up-tempo performances barely tick over the hour mark, requiring some fittingly grave preface. A pair of instrumental memorials by 20th-century Finnish composers set the tone at this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, in contrasting idioms which kept the ear fresh for the patient unfolding of Brahms’ rite of consolation and remembrance.

A Requiem in Our Time is a solemn title indeed for a short and largely festive suite composed in 1953 by Einojuhani Rautavaara. Scored for brass and percussion and dedicated to the memory of his mother, it would serve just as well to cut the ribbon on a new town hall. All the same, Oramo mined such pathos as there was to be found in the gleaming wrong-note tonality of the first three movements, before Becky Smith’s euphonium solo in the final Lacrymosa hinted at the expression of grief beyond words for the 25-year-old composer.

The astringent harmony and diffuse form of Aulis Sallinen’s Mauermusik (Wall Music) demanded closer listening. Inspired by the death of a young man in 1962, shot while attempting to escape East Germany by scaling the Berlin Wall, Sallinen’s threnody builds towards an uncomfortably graphic climax. Two- and three-note motifs drip through the orchestra like blood into a glass of water. The glass is shaken and then slowly poured out. As in the Rautavaara, Oramo’s strongly rhetorical direction, and the cultivated playing of the BBCSO, bestowed a stature on the piece that could not be anticipated from previous recordings.

By contrast, the German Requiem had its heart in the right place, but slips here and details there got in the way of a fully immersive experience. They included a bumpy start; a plastic-sounding organ, poking out of the texture now and then; carefully articulated but still English-accented German from the BBC Symphony Chorus. Oramo drew a strong narrative arc across the seven movements, which dipped in the vocally solid but anonymous contributions from the baritone Christian Senn. A little more time and space would not have gone amiss, especially at the Requiem’s great outburst of grief in the third movement – “Where shall I find comfort?” – and answering affirmation: “My hope rests in Thee”. The culminating fugue bolted off without a firm underpinning in the bass to mirror the Handelian assurance of the text.

The performance found its feet again in a sensitive, lilting account of “How lovely are thy dwellings”, before (not unusually) gaining deeper feeling and more elevated expression with the following soprano solo. The tempo of this movement is always the right one if the soprano can float the opening phrase in a single breath. Anu Komsi managed it with an uncanny, sing-song innocence and intensity, and the kind of faraway, piercing tone that has made her the pre-eminent modern interpreter of Sibelius’ Luonnotar. Her last phrase fell away, but no matter: she and Brahms had cast their spell.