The question of "why?"

Created: 04/11/2022 11:06 am

By: Susanne Greiner

The voices of the Vocalensemble Landsberg were able to unfold well in the simple, high funeral parlor of the forest cemetery.

© ks

Landsberg - "It's more of a reflection than a concert," says the leader of the vocal ensemble Matthias Utz on Sunday afternoon.

The Landsberg Choir performed on Palm Sunday together with the guitarist and lute player Erik Müller in the funeral home of the forest cemetery.

A free concert, audience donations go to local Ukraine aid.

And a reflection on the Easter hope promised at the start of Holy Week. 

A "small treatise on the great 'Why?'" – this is how Brahms is said to have described his four-part motet "Why is the light given to the laborious?".

And accordingly, the work begins with a questioning "Why?", forte to piano, major to minor - whereby the doubt (and sometimes also despair) of the human being about the question of meaning in view of the suffering in the world comes within reach.

There is currently no better way to start a concert on Palm Sunday.

Utz creates a program through the centuries.

He switched to cellist Pablo Casals and set a counterpoint to Brahms' polyphony with the more Gregorian lament "O vos omnes".

In addition to Elgar, a powerful, clearly jubilant Bruckner (Christus factus est) and Albert Becker's hopeful "I am the resurrection", the "Trag mi wind (Carry me, wind)" by Christian Dreo from Carinthia stands out.

The vocal ensemble weaves a carpet of sound with the sounds of the Carinthian and the dialect poet Brigitte Hubmann's text, bathes the hall in velvet and lets the surroundings resonate.

In the song, the poet, who died in 2010, looks at her own death, which should carry her, "over land over sea".

Dreo set her words to music days after her death.

With lute and guitar

Erik Müller begins with the lute and Dowland's 16th-century My Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home: a piece celebrating the Lord's return from the Netherlands and the Spanish War of Independence.

Unfortunately, history keeps repeating itself.

Müller presents the two contemporary composers – Agustín Barrios Mangoré from Paraguay and Heitor Villa-Lobos from Brazil – on the guitar.

Outstanding: Villa-Lobos, by which Müller plays one of his five Preludes.

The composer is said to have said that the Preludes were “letters to posterity” without receiving an answer.

The initially hesitant melody, accompanied by chords, seems to be a draft for a "why" - and thus almost closes the circle to Brahms.

The funeral parlor is a "place that can also be more" than a mourning hall, says Utz before the last chorale.

Maybe because the music can give an idea for the answer to the question "why".