Miserere Tour Concert

Justin Doyle, Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin, leads the choir in the first tour concert of the season, guiding the audience through a programme that moves between lament and hope, cries from the depths and the certainty of redemption. In it, sacred music from the Baroque and the 20th century is woven into a compelling dramaturgical arc.

Domenico Scarlatti’s magnificent ten-part Stabat mater from 1724 opens the evening, a too rarely performed work of incomparable aura whose music touches on fundamental questions of human existence and speaks directly to the heart. At the centre of the programme stands Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, one of the most important and at the same time most beautiful choral works of the 20th century. The Swiss composer wrote the Mass between 1922 and 1926 and then kept the score under lock and key for forty years. “At the time, the Mass was for me only a matter between God and myself,” Martin explained after the work’s premiere in 1963.

Set against this deeply personal testament of faith and spirituality are three works that circle around the longing for divine mercy: “Miserere mei, Deus – God, be merciful unto me” – thus begins Psalm 51. In his 2009 setting of this text, Scottish composer James MacMillan leads listeners into sound worlds full of radiance and warmth; from the very first bars it becomes clear that the plea for mercy will be heard. Harsher and more mystical, more turbulent yet no less heartfelt, is the Miserere by Slovenian composer Nana Forte from 2023. The medieval poem Stabat mater tells, in dramatic fashion, of grief, loss, powerlessness, empathy and consolation: Mary beneath the cross of her son Jesus is filled with pain and at the same time mediates between God and humankind as they implore her for support.