A Chorus of Their Own

After years of periodic collaborations with Santa Barbara choirs alone or in various combinations, the Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus makes its debut with the orchestra’s April 25-26 pair of concerts. The ensemble was assembled as something akin to an all-star choir, comprised of community choral singers from many other organizations, including Adelfos Ensemble, Santa Barbara Choral Society, Santa Barbara Gay Men’s Chorus, Santa Barbara Master Chorale, Quire of Voyces, UCSB Choir and Westmont College Choir – as well as area churches, and choirs with no official associations with other groups. 

“We wanted to be as inclusive as possible and open it up to anyone in the community who wanted to sing with us and can read music and sing on time and on pitch,” explained symphony Music & Artistic Director Nir Kabaretti. “It’s mostly members of existing choirs, but also those who don’t want to make commitments beyond each program. They have the opportunity to perform and only do our condensed rehearsals over three or four weeks prior to the performance.” 

More importantly, creating the Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus allows the orchestra to shape the sound of the singers for each program – but under Kabaretti’s singular baton, rather than through the conductors of the various choirs working separately, as with collaborations in the past. 

“We can make it really homogeneous for everyone instead of the different choruses working separately,” Kabaretti said. “We start rehearsing with our singers from scratch and they’re there for all of our rehearsals, and we have the flexibility to select the voices that work best for the program.” 

The new vocal ensemble – 150 singers strong and culled from more than 200 applicants – bursts on the scene with a big work from Brahms, namely the master composer’s A German Requiem, a title Kabaretti said reflects the language only. 

“Brahms actually thought about calling it A Human Requiem, because his approach to the words is very different from the usual requiem masses in the Latin liturgy,” he said. “It’s very human because it focuses more on comforting the living rather than a prayer for the dead. Brahms talks about emotions like love and sorrow and longing much more than Jesus and death and Hell.”

Brahms purposely omitted Christian dogma typical of a Latin requiem in favor of text that takes passages from Psalms that normally don’t have a place in the Catholic Requiem, Kabaretti said.

“It is about the feelings that come with the awareness that we are only temporarily in this world, the sadness that someone close to you is passing away, the sorrow of missing them rather than the fear of punishment by God. It’s very deeply human, but it’s not very orthodox. In fact, it actually quotes a Psalm but Brahms changes the scripture to say you will be protected like a mother protects her children, with God portrayed as a female.”

The humanistic approach extends to the Brahms’ requiem music itself, full of Romantic melodicism and evoking a wide range of beautiful emotions, Kabaretti said. 

“He treats the chorus as the human voice giving comfort in situations of pain, and the expression is absolutely gorgeous,” he said. “There’s a strong relationship between the word and the music. When he speaks about love, you will hear a really beautiful, charming melody, and there are quieter moments where the orchestration sort of drops. It’s very expressive.” 

To augment the Brahms, Kabaretti decided to add Mahler’s hauntingly beautiful Three Rückert-Lieder, the trio of nuanced songs composed at the beginning of the 20th century. “Mahler continues the line of German art songs, and these echo the theme about love, longing and sorrow,” he explained. “The song ‘I’m Lost in the World’ is very similar in that she’s singing about feeling lost before it transforms into joy that we are not alone.” 

Further amplifying the emotional impact, the conductor is interspersing the art songs within the body of the requiem to be performed as one big piece. Given the piece’s history, Kabaretti figured even Brahms wouldn’t have objected. 

“When he was accused by the church that it was not religious enough, he agreed to add some movements with very religious pieces to make it a little more Christian. I think if he approved that, he’d be happy with me adding more humanistic songs.” 

In addition to the new chorus debut, the concert also features two vocal soloists, baritone Daniel Scofield and soprano Magdalena Kuźma, the latter a 2022 Music Academy of the West alumna, fresh off portraying Papageno in another German classic, The Magic Flute, at Met Opera last December. “She’s a wonderful singer, and her German is very good,” Kabaretti said. 

MAW will have an even bigger connection to the symphony’s January 2025 concert, when the program consists of all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos, including one played by the winner of this summer’s MAW piano competition. The Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus will return for the Mozart Requiem in November and next May’s performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection.”

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