The greatest choral composer of the late nineteenth century was surely Johannes Brahms, and his first big hit was the hour-long A German Requiem. Spurred on by the death of his mother, Brahms chose his own Biblical texts, rather than setting the traditional liturgical Requiem, or mass for the dead. Few Requiems share so eloquently Brahms’s message of comfort to the living. In fact, when Brahms considered the work’s title years later, he confessed: “I could happily omit the ‘German’ and simply say ‘Human.’” We will present this masterwork with Brahms’s own orchestral reduction for two pianists, in which his genius for counterpoint and choral textures is brought to the fore.