Los Angeles Master Chorale

Harris Theater

Called a “perennially superb ensemble” by The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Master Chorale makes its Harris Theater debut with Music to Accompany a Departure, staged by acclaimed theater director Peter Sellars. In this staging — described as “transcendent” by the Los Angeles Times — twenty-four singers from the Chorale breathe life and movement into this deeply personal meditation on death and what it means to say goodbye in times of struggle.

Together, the Chorale and Sellars have created a stirring, searing, and thoroughly contemporary work from an ancient source: composer Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (Funeral Music) is a musical response to the plagues of his time. Considered to be the first known requiem composed in the German language, the Musikalische Exequien stands as Schütz’s most extensive funerary composition. The work, composed during the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, anticipates the great oratorios of Bach while synthesizing the major traditions of sacred orchestral and choral music from past composers and Schütz’s own era.