The Milwaukee Symphony Chorus has had a busy and ambitious season, celebrating 50 years of singing the world’s greatest choral masterworks with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Its historic 2025-26 season comes to a close with Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” later this month.
That piece alone represents an enormous undertaking, but the season also included several other iconic works: Handel’s “Messiah,” J.S. Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.
To cap things off, the MSO is releasing a live recording of “Ein deutsches Requiem” (“A German Requiem”) by Johannes Brahms. It was performed at the Bradley Symphony Center in April 2025 and features soprano Sonya Headlam and bass-baritone Dashon Burton, with outgoing Music Director Ken-David Masur at the podium.
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The lynchpin of this recording — and of all the choral works presented this season — is Cheryl Frazes Hill, who is just wrapping up her ninth year as director of the chorus. She was very kind to join me for a Zoom interview in the midst of an incredibly busy time. (Never mind rehearsals and performances in both Milwaukee and Chicago, her daughter is getting married in a couple of months!)
When I asked about how she prepared for such a mammoth season, Frazes Hill expressed gratitude to her mentor Margaret Hillis, the founder of the Chicago Symphony Chorus.
Frazes Hill authored the biography “Margaret Hillis: Unsung Pioneer” about her mentor and friend. Frazes Hill describes Hillis as “a conductor, chorus director, airplane pilot, educator, activist, mentor and advocate who blazed a trail upon which many continue to tread.”
“She was a very regimented and very disciplined conductor, and it all begins with score study — what are the challenges going to be in each piece?” she said. “I then create a chart, working from the performance state backwards. And that chart has every movement of the piece, and it has every rehearsal date and how I’m going to break those dates down.”
“And then it’s a layering process, so of course notes and rhythms are addressed in the early stages,” she continued. “But then we build in the text. And as we move into the expressive qualities — the volume, the style, the inflection, and what have you — each layer gives [the singers] an opportunity to revisit the things that we’ve already worked with, but at the same time you’re adding complexity.”
“It’s kind of like a chess game, and it’s a little bit improvisatory,” she said.
In this new recording of the Brahms German Requiem, all that disciplined rehearsal and skilled artistry comes to fruition beautifully. It’s a rich, comforting, deeply expressive rendering of some of Brahms’s most personal music.
He had experienced some difficult losses: his dear friend and mentor Robert Schumann fell apart slowly. His death left Brahms grieving for years. Brahms started on the requiem then but set it aside. It was the sudden death of his beloved mother that provided the impetus for its completion.
When Brahms put together the texts for his requiem, he didn’t utilize the standard Latin mass, but rather selected excerpts from Martin Luther’s German-language Bible. Not once is Christ or resurrection mentioned. Brahms later mentioned to a friend that the work could just as easily be titled “A Human Requiem.”
The overarching raison d’être of the work is to provide consolation for the living.
“He sets up so many of the movements by explaining how vulnerable we are,” Frazes Hill said. “‘We are all like grass that withereth,’ and yet at the end of each of those movements, there’s always that turning point. Brahms is clearly leading us to the place of comfort.”
It’s a beautiful work full of warmth and radiance. It may sound less challenging than the big Beethoven pieces the chorus has worked on, but according to Frazes Hill, “When people listen to a good performance of Brahms’s Requiem, they don’t really understand how difficult it is.” It’s demanding musically, and there’s also a lot of vocal and physical stamina required to get through the work in top form.
And the singers must give of themselves emotionally.
“I always tell the singers the audience will not feel anything that you don’t, and it’s not necessarily about belief,” Frazes Hill said. “It’s really about how you connect to the message and try to convey it through your own voice, so that we are doing justice to the performance, to the composition.”
“Our bass soloist [Dashon Burton] at the end of one of the performances just completely broke down in tears during the bows. I can say that there was a similar emotional release after our ‘St. Matthew Passion,’ and I have a feeling we will have the same after [‘Missa Solemnis’],” Frazes Hill said.
“Ein deutsches Requiem” is quietly powerful, full of reassurance and comfort. It’s beautifully interpreted and executed by the orchestra, soloists and chorus. A sonic gift that soothes body and soul. It’s available on the MSO’s own label via all the major streaming platforms on June 5.
To experience the orchestra and chorus live, their final performances of the season are June 13 and 14 with Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.”
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