London Philharmonic Orchestra

Zimmermann: Ecclesiastical Action, for two speakers, bass and orchestra
Brahms: A German Requiem

Vladimir Jurowski: conductor
Miah Persson: soprano (A German Requiem)
Dietrich Henschel: bass-baritone
Omar Ebrahim: Speaker 1 (Ecclesiastical Action)
Malcolm Sinclair: Speaker 2 (Ecclesiastical Action)
Annabel Arden: director
London Philharmonic Choir

Five days after completing his ‘ecclesiastical action’ And Turning Then, I Saw There Great Injustice That is Done Under the Heavens, Bernd Alois Zimmermann took his own life. His oratorio on passages from Ecclesiastes and Dostoevsky is a grim, hard-hitting prophecy of loss and emptiness; a stark piece of performance art inextricably connected to the Fluxus school of late 1960s Germany. It stands in utter contrast to the hopeful humanity of Brahms’s German Requiem. Brahms’s glowing messages of brotherhood and consolation will feel renewed by Zimmermann’s urgent challenge to them.