by Daniel Hathaway

On Saturday, October 25 at 7:30 pm in the University of Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, Frank Jacobs will conduct the Masterworks Chorale of the Summit Choral Society in Johannes Brahms’s German Requiem. The performance marks twenty-five years to the day since the chorus sang that work on its first concert.

“It seems like yesterday. Twenty-five years ago, we were just an upstart organization with no money,” Jacobs recalled in a telephone conversation. “We did the concert at Cuyahoga Falls High School in English with Brahms’s original accompaniment of two pianos — we threw in harp and timpani for extra color. Now, 25 years later on the same date, we’re doing it with full orchestra and in the way that it needs to be heard, in German. The music itself is so moving and powerful. It’s a universal statement of what we all face in this human condition — death.” [Read more…]