Of the two dozen or so programs that Matthias Pintscher has conducted here since assuming the Kansas City Symphony’s music directorship in 2024, few are as deeply personal to him as this fall’s concert of music by Brahms, Schoenberg, and Olga Neuwirth. Brahms’ German Requiem, as the Symphony is calling the concert of November 20-22, brings one of the large choral-orchestral masterpieces to Helzberg Hall and places it in a context that both illuminates its place in music history and connects it to aspects of Matthias’ own life and career. 

“There are many facets to it,” the German-born conductor said recently of the program. “It is about making a landscape of consolation, of grief.” The concert is also a showcase for the 160-voice Symphony Chorus, now under the directorship of Betsy Burleigh and poised for new challenges. The piece feels just right “for where we are as a chorus,” Matthias said of the Requiem, which was first performed at Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday 1868. “It has a sound-world that requires intimacy from the chorus … a kind of personalized sound that can only be reached when the chorus feels on top of the text, and of the material. So it feels right to tackle this now.” 

Unlike the dark, imperious Requiems by Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz, and others, Brahms’ is a work of consolation—with texts of empathy, healing, and relief drawn from both the Old and the New Testaments of the German translation of the Bible. “Avoiding the liturgical Latin text makes this a more ‘human’ Requiem,” Matthias said, echoing several commentators over the years. “It’s about grieving and loss and mortality and comfort.” Indeed, instead of the fire-and-brimstone Dies Irae of the Latin text (“Day of wrath … Lord, show mercy, lest I burn in everlasting fire”), Brahms gives us “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted” and the Psalmist’s “How lovely are Thy dwelling places.” 

Matthias has provocatively paired Brahms’ 75-minute milestone with two concert openers that present aspects of mourning and loss that stand in marked contrast to Brahms’ vision. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), by a composer who fled Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in Los Angeles, tells a tale of defiance and tragic sadness: A group of Jewish men in a Nazi prison camp march to their doom singing the Shema Yisrael prayer. Just as intriguing is Olga Neuwirth’s Tombeau I (2023), an homage to Matthias’ primary musical mentor, the French avant-gardist and conductor Pierre Boulez, who died in 2016. 

Brahms began his Requiem shortly after his dear friend Robert Schumann had plunged himself into the Rhine, in a suicide attempt. But he didn’t finish the piece until more than a decade later, completing a seventh movement in memory of his late mother in May 1868. The seven movements of the completed Requiem form a continuous ascending progression, both from a tonal and a narrative standpoint. 

“It only works as a whole,” Matthias said. “He is painting with a large brush and a very large canvas, and the brush never leaves the canvas. So it is a long continuous arc, and that’s what makes it unique.” This Requiem also contains poignant pauses, he added, “where we are activated as listeners to include our own repertoire of sensations and memories.”

Once Matthias had chosen the Brahms as a centerpiece, he pondered how to place it in a context that would make sense for today’s listener, and for the composer’s broader humanist outlook. Uppermost in the conductor’s mind was the series of homages by his composer-friend, the celebrated Austrian-born Olga Neuwirth, who like Matthias has paid tribute to Boulez in several of her works. 

“It is a Kaddish, even if it’s not described that way,” Matthias said of the Tombeau I, likening it to the traditional Jewish mourning prayer. Olga builds this fascinating miniature for large orchestra on several pertinent tunes (such as The Death of Siegfried from Wagner’s Ring) that are intertwined with melancholy Central European folk tunes the composer’s grandfather sang and recorded before she was born. 

“It’s very stark, and overcharged with information,” Matthias said of the Tombeau, which he has conducted several times, including performances on the Symphony’s European Tour programs this August. “For me it sort of describes the collapse of our European world. … It’s overwhelmingly massive and powerful … with the folk tunes occasionally drowned out, suffocated, with the mass of sound.” When Matthias conducted the premiere in Paris, “already in the dress rehearsal musicians were shedding tears, they were so deeply moved.” 

Boulez was one of the hugely gifted musical geniuses of the 20th century, a vanguard of the avant-garde and a mentor to a whole generation of composers and conductors. His compositions are of a complexity that we are still coming to terms with. It was Boulez who, in 2013, pointed to Matthias to fill the post of music director of the ensemble he himself had founded, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. 

Tombeau I begins, in fact, with a dense chord borrowed from Boulez’ Repons, then continues with an inexorable sense of movement, of dread, of forward-motion. “That’s what he believed in, this idea of constantly being in motion,” Matthias said. “This is what stays with me about Pierre: Standstill is boredom, you need to be in motion.” Boulez’ death was one of several losses Matthias has suffered in recent years, including most recently that of another mentor, composer-conductor Péter Eötvös, who died in 2024.

Survivor is the final piece of this program’s puzzle. “I thought, if we’re talking about the Holocaust and the Kaddish and the Requiem,” Matthias said, “these are all different ways of grieving and rendering homage.” In this rarely performed work, a narrator recounts escaping death in a World War II prison camp only because guards believe him to be dead. 

Matthias has long yearned to perform Survivor, which includes male chorus and is connected at least spiritually to Brahms. For not only did Schoenberg venerate this “progressive” 19th-century composer, “there is also an invisible bridge, a sort of  musical transition from late Brahms to very early Schoenberg,” Matthias said.

Thus the interconnections in this program are fascinatingly intricate. Schoenberg loved Brahms, and Boulez the conductor was (like Matthias) a master of both orchestral and operatic repertoire—including the music of Wagner to which Olga alludes.  

Which brings us to Matthias Pintscher, in whose musical personality all of these strands join. Now in his third season with Kansas City, he is one of the most important composer-conductors of the “Boulez tradition,” and like his mentor he venerates music from a vast range of traditions. 

Matthias’ determination to put together such a personal program is a reflection, perhaps, of his increased comfort here—with the Symphony, with the musical community, and with Kansas City. When he accepted the post here, it felt unconventional and yet somehow perfect.

“I immediately wanted to put a ring on my finger, because I felt this is the place where I belong,” he said. “And now after two years … I’m more deeply in love than ever with this community, with this city, and with this institution and what it represents.” 

It was an unexpected but an ideal fit, and both he and his partner, Ethan Bensdorf, have taken to the city. “Who would have thought it?” Matthias said. “I knew nothing about Kansas City, yet here I am, feeling so at home.” 

—By Paul Horsley

Brahms’ German Requiem is performed November 20th through the 22nd at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. For tickets call 816-471-0400 or go to kcsymphony.org. To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send him an email (paul@kcindependent.com) or reach him on Facebook or on Instagram or X (@phorsleycritic).