The Orchestra at Temple Square and Temple Square Chorale will join their musical talents for this year’s Spring Concert in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Friday and Saturday, April 20-21, 2018. The evening’s performances will be under the baton of Ryan Murphy, associate music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and conductor of the Temple Square Chorale. Ticket availability will be announced soon.

The Orchestra at Temple Square is an all-volunteer musical organization formed at the direction of Gordon B. Hinckley, then President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its charter is to accompany the musical ensembles of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir organization and also to perform in concerts of its own.

Temple Square Chorale

The Temple Square Chorale was formed in 1999, as part of changes to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir organization which included the creation of the Orchestra at Temple Square. The Chorale serves as a training ensemble for new members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It is comprised of new members completing their audition process as well as those members who were new to the Choir the previous year plus a few other current Choir members to provide a complement of roughly 110 singers.

The spring concert program will include two favorite Johannes Brahms works. The Academic Festival Overture, op. 80, was composed as a musical “thank you” to the University of Breslau, which had notified Brahms he would be awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy. The composer himself conducted the premier of the overture in 1881—and received his degree—at a special convocation held by the university. Of the Brahms’ catalog of 122 numbered works (and at least 40 more unnumbered works), he wrote only 14 works for orchestra—and of those, only two overtures. This overture is considered one of Brahms’s most beloved instrumental musical works.

Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), composed by Brahms between 1865 and 1868 is a large-scale work for chorus and orchestra. It comprises seven movements making this work Brahms’s longest composition. Nearly all prior music requiems used the traditional Latin text of the Catholic mass for the dead. Brahms took a different approach as he chose his own verses from reformer Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible—selecting passages that would not only mourn the dead but also comfort the living. This performance of Ein Deutsches Requiem will be sung in German by the Temple Square Chorale accompanied by the Orchestra at Temple Square.

TICKETS
Concert tickets are free but required. Tickets will be available on Tuesday, March 20 at 10:00 a.m. MDT on a first-come, first-served basis at lds.org/events, by calling 801-570-0080, or at the Conference Center ticket office. Admission to this event is limited to those ages eight and older.

Patrons without tickets are invited to stand by for last-minute seating which is usually available each evening. The standby line will form at the flagpole by the Tabernacle at 6:30 p.m. for the evening performances.