Review: Symphony’s chorus delivers full-bodied polish for Brahms ‘Requiem’

With a tightly executed German Requiem, the San Diego Symphony’s Brahms Festival began with a choral bang Feb. 27 at the Jacobs Music Center downtown.

Rehearsed to a full-bodied polish by the symphony’s chorus master Dr. Andrew Megill, and led with a sure, sculpting hand by Music Director Rafael Payare, the San Diego Symphony Chorus confidently held the spotlight in its fourth program since debuting in Mahler’s Resurrection symphony October 2024. 

Born as an official, fully auditioned chorus when the Jacobs Center renovation added a new 80-seat choral terrace above and behind the orchestra floor, the chorus gives the symphony the ability to stage large-scale choral-orchestral works, from Mahler’s Third Symphony (May 2025) and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges (October) to Brahms’ Requiem, that composer’s longest and largest total work.

Uniting members of the San Diego and Los Angeles Master Chorales and even some guest choristers from Montana and Illinois, the chorus brought both majesty and tenderness to Brahms’ seventy-minute “cantata of mourning” — the only work on a program that inaugurated a five-performance, six-work celebration of the “third B” (after Bach and Beethoven). 

Though nowhere near the 200 singers Brahms himself once led for his Requiem, the chorus produced a sound of striking volume, the orchestra supportively modulating its power. In Payare’s hands the two ensembles achieved a sweet spot in balanced, synchronized sound. In the first movement, the horns’ gentle glow in the opening measures and Sarah Skuster’s underpinning oboe complemented the sopranos’ sustained, luminous upper tessitura in “Die mit Tränen säen…” (“They that sow in tears…”).

From the second movement’s menacing tread (“All flesh is grass”), Payare and timpanist Ryan Tilisi brought out the dark “Dies Irae”-like terror in Brahms’ music — sparking the night’s only between-movement applause. Payare deftly injected this same palpable, propulsive excitement to the chorus’s apocalyptic proclamation “Denn es wird die Posaune schallen” (“For the trumpet shall sound”) in the sixth movement.

Though Brahms wrote the male soloist’s part for a bass, Michael Sumuel’s bass-baritone range enabled him to strike the true-low depths (F2) of the third movement’s “ein Ende” and the sixth’s “keine bleibende Statt” but also inject a dramatic higher-register edge in the third movement’s “Nun Herr, wess soll ich” and the sixth’s “Geheimnis” turning point.

Brahms gave the soprano only one movement, but the Fifth (“Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit”) is the Requien’s spiritual heart, the last movement Brahms composed and his most direct mourning of his mother’s recent death. French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne brought just the right consoling, maternal balm to “aber ich will euch wieder sehen” (“But I will see you again”) and lofted a high A of exalted warmth in “Ich will euch trösten” (“I will comfort you”). 

This was a luminous performance that fully delivered what Brahms biographer Jan Swafford has called the Requiem’s “uncanny aura of grace.”

By concert’s end, the chorus had earned Megill — also choral director of Payare’s Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal and the Carmel Bach Festival — his post-concert curtain call with Sumuel and Boulianne. The chorus’s next performance — for Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle — will be one to watch.

On the margins, the symphony horns were sometimes tonally unsteady, and though the English surtitles generally worked, the translations themselves sometimes faltered (an awkward “no continuing city” for “keine bleibende Statt,” for example, instead of “no lasting dwelling place”). Adding the original German might have helped.

Following Brahm’s first and second symphonies on Feb. 28 and the Requiem’s reprise on March 1, the symphony’s Brahms Festival continues this weekend, with Greek ace violinist Leonidas Kavakos performing Brahms’ violin concerto on March 6 and 7, paired with the third and fourth symphonies, respectively.

Viva Brahms.