Afslutningskoncert på Golden Days Festival

Once again this year, Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir closes the annual Copenhagen-based Golden Days Festival.

Golden Days is a cultural-historical festival that explores themes of history, science, and culture. The 2025 edition of the festival is themed “Love,” and in response to this, Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir presents a beautiful programme of love-themed music by Johannes Brahms.

There are few singers who have not performed Brahms’ choral music. He was an immensely prolific composer in the genre, and his choral works are of the highest artistic quality.

The two collections Sieben Lieder, opus 62 and Fünf Gesänge, opus 104, are both written for unaccompanied choir and contain some of Brahms’ most beloved choral pieces – including Waldesnacht (in opus 62). While Sieben Lieder is written in a light folk-song style—though not true folk songs—Fünf Gesänge is more complex, composed later in life when Brahms had definitively chosen a life of bachelorhood and was reflecting on lost youth, the approaching autumn of life, and its inevitable end.

The Liebeslieder, opus 52, consists of 18 short movements for four voices and piano four-hands. The texts are drawn from G.F. Daumer’s collection of folk songs and love poems. This flamboyant work may have been composed during the early realisation of Brahms’ deep longing for Clara Schumann — a love that was never fulfilled.

Between the three choral collections, pianists Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig will perform Brahms’ Waltzes, opus 39, composed during his time in Vienna. According to Brahms himself, the waltzes were written both as a tribute to the genre that was so beloved in Vienna, and while his thoughts were filled with “Vienna and pretty girls.” Here, the hope of love’s fulfilment still lives on.

PROGRAMME

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897):

Sieben Lieder, Op. 62 (1873–74)

Waltzes, Op. 39 for piano four-hands, Nos. 1–8 (1865)

Fünf Gesänge, Op. 104 (1888)

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Waltzes, Op. 39 for piano four-hands, Nos. 9–16
Liebeslieder, Op. 52 (1869)

Performers:

Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir

Piano: Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig

Conductor: Mogens Dahl