Bristol has been twinned with Hannover for 75 years, and this was celebrated by a pair of performances of Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem in Hannover, given by members of Bristol Choral Society and the Hannoversche Oratorienchor, directed by Keno Weber with soloists Samuel Hasselhorn and Ylva Stenberg. I was one of a party of several dozen who made the trip by rail or air.
A text used in the German Requiem, on the Latin School in Celle, near Hannover.
Hannover is a familiar city to me as I’ve visited it several times for other reasons, though not for quite a few years. We had free time to explore as well as an organised guided tour, while our evenings were for rehearsals and the performances in the Marktkirche (where I once heard the church’s choir sing a rather shaky performance of Lobet den Herrn at a service).
We all coped with the bilingual rehearsals and were glad that we got two shots at showing what we could do. Though the German Requiem is a strenuous work to sing even once, and I found my voice fraying by the end of the second performance! An additional bonus for me was that I hadn’t performed with an orchestra of any size for several years, as a result of the pandemic and the closure of Colston Hall/Bristol Beacon, and now I finally got the chance to do so.
Our concerts also included an orchestration of Brahms’ Vier ernste Gesänge by Detlev Glanert, sung by our baritone soloist. These were expanded with a ‘prelude’ to each one in a more modernist style (I detected the influence of the Three Orchestral Pieces, amongst other things).
It was good to travel to perform at someone else’s invitation rather just to indulge ourselves, and we felt very appreciated. (Germany makes rather more out of twinning arrangements than we do, for example by displaying coats of arms of twinned cities prominently.) It’s likely that we will see our Hanoverian acquaintances again for a return leg in the future.