Richard Strauss – Deutsche Motette
This classic of the late Romantic choral repertoire is very rarely performed in concert due to its extreme technical difficulty. One of the hardest tonal choral works ever written, with a dynamic range and complexity greater than any other choral work of the period, the Deutsche Motette divides into a staggering 23 parts as opposed to the more conventional 4 or 8, and requires soloists and chorus with unusually large ranges. In Strauss’s day only opera houses could muster the voices and expertise required, so it isn’t surprising that Strauss dedicated Deutsche Motette to the Berlin Opera chorus. Although most famous as a composer, Strauss also conducted operas for most of his life, and perhaps thought he owed the chorus something special to perform since he rarely used them in his own works.
The piece sets ecstatic and visionary words by the great German poet Friedrich RĂĽckert, and these embrace a universal theme, asking the whole of Creation, for all eternity, to keep watch over the sleeping poet. This is Strauss at his most luxuriant and characteristic.
(From BBC Singers online, http://www.bbc.co.uk/singers/learning/timeline_strauss.shtml)
Comedian Harmonists
The Comedian Harmonists were an internationally famous, all-male German close harmony ensemble that performed 1927-1934, one of Europe’s most successful musical groups before World War II. The group’s hallmark was its members’ ability to blend their voices together so that the individual singers could appear and disappear back into the vocal texture. Its repertoire was wide, ranging from folk and classical songs to witty popular songs of the day. The close-harmony musical style was a forerunner to contemporary a cappella singing as featured on NBC’s current show The Sing-Off. After a meteoric career of international tours, recordings, and film appearances, the Harmonists – of whom three members were Jewish – came to an abrupt end when Hitler’s regime forced them to disband. Their rise to stardom was the subject of the award-winning 1997 film The Harmonists.
More about Comedian Harmonists at www.comedian-harmonists.com.