When George Bernard Shaw heard Johannes Brahms’ “A German Requiem,” he dismissed it as dull, ponderous and “patiently borne only by the corpse.” Brahms, he added, was a morose fellow, who on the best of days would utter, “The grave is my goal.”

Too bad Shaw couldn’t hear the University of Maine’s music department presentation of the requiem Saturday night at the Maine Center for the Arts. Maybe he would have still grumbled about particulars, but the fine performance of conductor Ludlow Hallman and more than 200 singers could not have gone without praise.

The sheer number of people gathered together because they love to sing — and sing challenging pieces — is in and of itself a great deal of respectable fun. These are folks you usually only see at the supermarket, behind a desk or at church, and to see them lending their voices and spirits so joyfully was truly worthwhile. Whether you personally knew anyone in the chorus or not, you could feel proud of them for rigorously taking on this extraordinary project.

And Brahms’ requiem is quite an extraordinary mass for the dead. He abandoned the traditional Catholic mold and based his music on the Luthern Bible. It is believed, too, that he infused the composition with his own mourning for both his mother and beloved mentor Robert Schumann. It is a work of bold contrasts lending comfort to those in pain, and clear-sightedly looking at the bitter truths of human experience. It looks at death as both inevitable (“flesh is as grass”) and transcendent (“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”)

Hallman’s task of capturing the varied expressions of the piece was not an easy one, but he caught hold of the reins and drove the music through a sensitive and successful performance.

Soloists Joseph Wigget and Nancy Ogle, as baritone and soprano respectively, sang with intelligent understatement in their relatively brief parts. As “soloists,” our time on earth is brief, and for these two singers to play their roles any larger or grander would have been a mistake. It is the steadfastness of God that endures, and the orchestral score and community of voices kept busy showing that.

The tone of the evening could have been gray, but it wasn’t. It was dramatic like a calvary charge into heaven, and tenderly sad like a son’s tears shed upon the grave of his mother. Even the venerable George Bernard Shaw might have been moved to appreciate this community’s depiction of rejoicing and bereavement.