RIAS Kammerchor Berlin

As a profoundly religious Catholic, Anton Bruckner made the mysteries of faith the core theme of his music. Of course, at the beginning of his career as the organist at Linz Cathedral, he also composed numerous religious vocal works such as the “Psalm 112” WAB 35 and the seven-part “Ave Maria” WAB 6, in which his particular feeling for monumental scale is already starting to emerge. With his Mass in D minor Bruckner then firmly left the conventional field of functional religious composition behind him, as its scale and form went beyond any music that had ever been heard in Linz before. The motifs of fear and desperation expounded in the “Kyrie” literally dissolve in each of the work’s separate sections, before the mass as a whole ends with a contemplative epilogue. The RIAS Kammerchor, accompanied by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and together with a distinguished ensemble of international solists, offers insights into Bruckner’s early work as a church musician, while the programme also includes his late motet “Ecce sacerdos” WAB 13, in whose ecstatic music the composer also stumbled on echoes of Wagner’s “Parsifal”. The evening is introduced by the rarely-heard Overture in G minor WAB 98, which Bruckner wrote while he was still studying with Otto Kitzler: music that starts in the passionate tone of Wagner’s Prelude to “Tristan”, but then surprises the listener with sudden tutti outbursts and equally sudden returns to pianissimo.