Back-to-back Brahms

Do you like Brahms? That is a come-on line in a 1961 French-made Ingrid Bergman movie.

Whether you do or don’t like Brahms, the 19th-century German composer is big in Spokane this month.

The Spokane Symphony performed not one, but two of his concertos at its “Brahms Blast” two weeks ago. There has been plenty of Brahms’ chamber music from the Spokane String Quartet, and he’s hot in a continuing series of concerts at Gonzaga University.

Brahms returns to the INB Performing Arts Center on Friday when the symphony and Symphony Chorale perform “A German Requiem.”

Soprano Charlotte Pistor and baritone Frank Hernandez are the soloists. Eckart Preu, the orchestra’s music director, will conduct.

“A German Requiem” (in German, “Ein Deustches Requiem”) was the work that propelled Brahms from his position as a respected provincial composer into international fame. Brahms biographer Styra Avins points out that he was able to ask for and get five times the amount from his publisher for the Requiem as for any of his previous works.

“From then on,” Avins writes, “his financial worries were over.”

After its 1869 premiere in Bremen in Germany, the piece spread all over Europe and quickly even to America. Brahms became that very rare phenomenon – an internationally famous, highly successful, independent composer who could make his living just by writing music.

Friday’s performance will feature two internationally known soloists, one familiar to Spokane audiences, the other a Washington native who will make her Spokane debut.

Pistor grew up in Longview, Wash., and received her bachelor’s degree in music at Portland State University. In 1990, she attended summer master classes at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, where she studied with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Peter Schreier. Pistor stayed in Salzburg and sang in the opera chorus there before becoming a soloist.

The soprano soloist at the Salzburg Cathedral, she has sung frequently in recital and opera in Europe and has toured in Japan. She lives in Salzburg with her husband, Austrian baritone Falk Hutter, and their daughter.

Spokane considers Hernandez a favorite son though he actually grew up near Bellingham. During his student days at Whitworth College, where he studied with Spokane Opera founder Marjorie Halvorson, he performed with the symphony and the opera.

The baritone later studied with Richard Miller at the Oberlin College-Conservatory in Ohio before joining the Houston Grand Opera’s Studio Artists apprentice program.

Hernandez has since sung in Houston’s mainstage productions and with many of the nation’s regional opera companies as well at major houses such as Dallas Opera, Seattle Opera, Glimmerglass Opera and French and Italian opera houses.

He has also sung with major orchestras at Hollywood Bowl, with the Cleveland Orchestra and the National Symphony. He last sang with the Spokane Symphony in 2000 with two sold-out performances at The Met.

Pistor and Hernandez will join host Verne Windham to talk about their singing careers and about Brahms’ “German Requiem” at Classical Chats, the symphony’s pre-performance conversation, today at 12:15 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall. The 30-minute program will be televised on City Channel 5.

On Friday, Preu will discuss the program as a part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series in the INB-PAC auditorium at 7 p.m.