LÜBECK, GERMANY – NDR ELBPHILHARMONIE ORCHESTER – R. STRAUSS, SHOSTAKOVICH

Christina Nilsson, soprano
NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester
Semyon Bychkov, conductor

PROGRAMME
Richard Strauss: Vier letzte Lieder TrV 296
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65

Venue Note:

War, despair, mourning, farewell, death – the works in this concert programme deal with very serious matters and are therefore not exactly “light fare”. But where would music come closer to us, where would we experience it more intensively than in dealing with precisely these tragically current topics? After his cancellation due to illness in January, Maestro Semyon Bychkov makes up for his return to the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and lets Dmitri Shostakovich’s mighty Eighth Symphony meet Richard Strauss’s wistful “Four Last Songs”.

Shostakovich’s symphony was written in 1943, immediately after the victory of the Soviet troops over the Germans in Stalingrad. Officially, Stalin’s cultural ideologues wanted to see in this alleged “Stalingrad Symphony”, if not a victory celebration, then at least a dignified commemoration of the victims of the war. But anyone who knows Shostakovich suspects that there is more to his music! What do the desperate cries in the funeral march of the first movement tell us about, and what is the point of the relentless, brutally trampling motor skills of the third movement? It seems as if the composer is focusing on completely different victims: those who, like him, were affected by exclusion, restriction of freedom and psychological and physical violence …

Richard Strauss had also seen the horrors and sufferings of the Second World War with his own eyes when he wrote his “Four Last Songs” five years later. With this serene, dreamlike, sad and beautiful late work, the 84-year-old said goodbye to the world as he knew it in 1948. Aware of the approach of his own death, the “last Romantic” in European music history chose four poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff for the setting, in which everything revolves around transience. With breathtakingly beautiful orchestral sounds and vocal lines, the grand seigneur also looked back on his own work. In the concert of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson, who recently convinced here with her voluminous, luminous voice in the Gurre-Lieder, takes over the solo part.