David Requiro, left, and Itamar Zorman. (Courtesy of Erica Gannett)

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Apr. 8, 2014)
To usher out the 2013-2014 season in style at its Saturday night season finale concert at the Michigan Theater, the Ann Arbor Symphony has turned to music of Johannes Brahms.

“Why celebrate Brahms?” A2SO Music Director Arie Lipsky asked rhetorically in a phone call last week from his home in Buffalo, N.Y. “The obvious answer,” he said, “is ‘why not?’”

In fact, a “Brahms Festival,” as the concert is called, makes lots of sense, for as Lipsky pointed out, “admiration for Brahms is quite universal today.”

That was not always the case for this towering 19th century German composer whose work spans many genres. In his lifetime, as Lipsky noted, Brahms was faulted by some contemporaries for “not being revolutionary enough, like Beethoven and Wagner, who were exploring new and bold ways of composing. Brahms dared to master the past, the art of the baroque and the classical eras, and brought the essence to the romantic era.”

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