Simone Young
Maria Bengtsson
Wolfgang Koch Richard Strauss
Alexander von Zemlinsky

This concert brings together two major works from the late Romantic tradition. Strauss's tone poem stands side by side with Alexander von Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, a work that inspired both Berg and Schoenberg.

Strauss: Tod und Verklärung

"Dying is exactly as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung," Richard Strauss (1864–1949) is said to have remarked in his final hours in 1949. The work was composed in 1888/89. The fact that he remembered it 60 years later shows how much it meant to him.

Tod und Verklärung depicts the death of an artist. Through the music, we are taken through the final part of an old man's life, the struggle between life and death as he sees his life pass before him, and finally a moving and reconciling conclusion. The tone poem is divided into four sections and demonstrates Strauss's exceptional ability to create orchestral colour.

Zemlinsky: Lyric Symphony

Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher. He came from a multicultural family that eventually converted to Judaism, which led him to flee to the United States in 1933.

His best-known work is the Lyric Symphony (1923), scored for soprano, baritone, and orchestra. Zemlinsky based the work on texts by the poet Rabindranath Tagore and composed in a kind of hyper-Romantic style. The work served as inspiration for both Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian recipient of a Nobel Prize in any category.