My fondest memory

Brahms and Bruckner Motets

Tenebrae/nigel Short Signum SIGCD430

Our disc of Brahms and Bruckner motets gives me a real glow. It was particularly supported by Andrew Mellor, our sound engineer, who for years had wanted Tenebrae to record these two composers. Andrew had recently lost his father to cancer and so asked if we could do this recording to benefit Macmillan Cancer Support. We didn’t have that many sessions to record the music in and time was a bit tight, but it was brilliant just to let the singers loose on some repertoire that is very well known, plus discover other bits that are totally unfamiliar, such as Brahms’s Festund Gedenksprüche,

which is very dramatic and very beautiful. We nearly ran out of time to include Brahms’s Geistliches Lied, but I really wanted to do it so I asked the singers just to go for it. It proved very, very emotional – it was extraordinary. A video was made of the recording sessions, and at the end of the Geistliches Lied you can see one of the sopranos crying. There was this amazingly passionate sound coming out and a beautiful intensity that is hard to explain.