Sacred Music - Brahms and Bruckner

Presented by Simon Russell Beale

This first part from a series televised on BBC FOUR, take us on a journey through the history of western sacred music and look at how religious music has continued to thrive despite the increasingly secular nature of society. The actor and former chorister Simon Russell Beale travels to Germany and Austria to explore the work of two musical giants, Brahms and Bruckner. With accompanying music performed by Harry Christophers and his choir "The Sixteen", Simon discovers the work of Johannes Brahms, whose epic a German Requiem took texts from the Lutheran Bible; and Anton Bruckner, a devout Catholic, obsessive-compulsive and musical radical. Simon undertakes a journey that starts in North Germany and finishes in the Austrian capital, Vienna, where both composers eventually settled.