Continuing a decades-long collaboration with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, including the world-renowned Lagrime di San Pietro, director Peter Sellars returns for “Music to Accompany a Departure”, set to the music of Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (Funeral Music). Twenty-four singers breathe life and movement into this meditation on death and homage to those who have left us. Heinrich Schütz remains one of the most revered composers in the history of sacred music. Though a majority of his compositions are lost to history, including the earliest German opera, Schütz’s surviving works are of such a caliber that his place in music

history is secured. Considered to be the first known requiem composed in the German language, the Musikalische Exequien stands as Schütz’s most extensive funerary compositions. Consisting of three parts played throughout an elaborate service, Schütz’s work anticipates the great

oratorios of Bach while synthesizing the major traditions of sacred orchestral and choral music from past composers and his own era.