Requiem Aeternam: Kathy Saltzman Romey

Voices of Ascension
Kathy Saltzman Romey, Guest Conductor

Thursday, February 18, 2027 at 7:30 pm
Church of the Ascension

As part of Voices of Ascension’s new Choral Visionaries series, Voices welcomes Kathy Saltzman Romey, long-time Director of Choral Activities at the University of Minnesota and Artistic Director of the Minnesota Chorale. A frequent collaborator with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival, and the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, and a long-time collaborator of Helmuth Rilling, Romey brings international depth and authority to this searching meditation on mortality and transcendence.

At the heart of the program is Hugo Distler’s rarely heard Totentanz (“Dance of Death”), presented in a theatrically staged performance. In this stark and expressionistic work, Death summons figures from every walk of life to account for themselves, confronting each with the limits of power, status, and certainty.

The program culminates in Herbert Howells’s Requiem, a work of profound stillness and consolation that brings the evening to a luminous and deeply felt conclusion. Johannes Brahms’s Warum? (“Why?”) frames the program’s searching spirit, while Knut Nystedt’s Immortal Bach offers a moment of suspended reflection along the way.