Program
Richard Strauss (1864–1949)
“Metamorphosen”, a symphonic study for 23 solo strings, TrV 290, AV 142 (1945)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 –1893)
Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique”, B minor, Op. 74 (1893)
musicAeterna Orchestra
Conductor — Teodor Currentzis
Details
The musicAeterna Orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis will perform two compositions considered the pinnacle of the symphonic tragedy genre at the opening of the Diaghilev Festival 2022.
Richard Strauss was composing the symphonic etude “Metamorphosen” in the last months of World War II and finished it in April 1945. The experience of living through a catastrophe gave impetus for the birth of one of the most exquisite symphonic adagios. “Perhaps, Strauss lived until 85 years solely to create this magnificent thing,” the French critic Roland-Manuel would later write. Using centuries-old rhetorical means of expressing grief, weaving motifs in a masterful, continuously changing counterpoint, Strauss composed an elegy for the death of the former world.
Tchaikovsky in his Symphony No. 6 paves the way to the future, to the acute expression of musical psychodramas of the 20th century. Here the music’s emotional charge reaches an unprecedented level. The extreme imaginative and dynamic contrasts that bewildered the first listeners still retain a shocking power of impact and inevitably throw the audience off balan