🗓️ THURSDAY, MARCH 25 | 7:30 PM
📍BROWNING CENTER AT WSU
The Utah Symphony brings Brahms’ German Requiem to Austad Auditorium in the most ambitious program of the Masterworks season. This isn’t the requiem you might expect. Brahms wrote it not for the dead, but for the living. The music is warm, consoling, and deeply human, and it’s surrounded by two works that deepen its emotional weight: Ives’ The Unanswered Question and Nico Muhly’s Doom Painting for trumpet and orchestra.
The evening opens with Ives’ The Unanswered Question, a short piece unlike anything else in classical music. A solo trumpet calls out over quiet strings. Woodwinds try to answer and can’t. It’s haunting, beautiful, and over in under six minutes, but it sets the tone for everything that follows.
Then comes Nico Muhly’s Doom Painting, a trumpet concerto that traces the instrument’s role through biblical history: ceremonial processions, visions of the last judgment, and the jubilation of the psalms. Norwegian soloist Tine Thing Helseth performs. She’s one of the most celebrated brass soloists in the world, known for a warm, lyrical sound that rewrites what people think a trumpet can do. She and Music Director Designate Markus Poschner gave the piece its world premiere together in Antwerp in 2025.
After intermission, the full Utah Symphony Chorus joins the orchestra for Brahms’ German Requiem. Soprano Heidi Stober and baritone John Moore are the vocal soloists. The piece is massive in scale, with full orchestra and chorus, but intimate in feeling. Brahms wrote it to comfort the grieving, and the music does exactly that. You don’t need to understand the German text to feel what it means. The moment the chorus enters is physical: a wall of sound that holds you.
On the podium is Markus Poschner, the Utah Symphony’s Music Director Designate. His appointment marks a new chapter for the orchestra, and this program is a window into the kind of music-making he’s bringing. Join us at Austad Auditorium on Thursday, March 25 at 7:30 PM.
Program
Markus Poschner, conductor
Tine Thing Helseth, trumpet
Heidi Stober, soprano
John Moore, baritone
Utah Symphony Chorus, Austin McWilliams, director
IVES The Unanswered Question
MUHLY Doom Painting (Trumpet Concerto)
Intermission
BRAHMS A German Requiem
