Thu, 13. 1. 2022, 7.00 p.m.

A3 STRAUSS | MAHLER

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

Our January Subscription Series A concert features works by two giants of late Romantic music, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

Richard Strauss composed in many forms at different stages of his life. At times he was fascinated by the world of opera, at other times by the symphonic poem, but the one musical genre that Strauss pursued throughout his life was songs, which he liked to compose even as a young man and to which he returned towards the end of his life, writing over 150 in total. These were quite often written for his spouse Pauline who was an operatic soprano, and after her opera career she continued to give regular concert performances of his songs, which were always well received by audiences and performers alike thanks to their pleasing melodic patterns and great expressiveness. Even today his songs are considered to be among the best of Strauss's work, and the selection we hear tonight is performed by the leading Czech soprano Kateřina Kněžíková, accompanied by the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra.

The song was also important in the compositional development of Gustav Mahler, and they often found their way into his symphonies which afforded him almost worldwide popularity. Mahler had no misgivings about using the vocal element in his symphonies in much the same way as he often had a tendency to extend the conventional or standard instrumental deployment, creating a musical language of his own characterised by a monumentality drawing on deep-seated philosophical reflection. His fourth symphony in G major, completed in 1900, is the "most classical" in comparison with the ones that preceded it in terms of its overall scale and its traditional and more modest orchestral requirement. With a usual running time of under an hour, the symphony is one of Mahler's shortest. The vocal element in the final movement consists of the song "Das himmlische Leben" symbolising a child's vision of heaven, and is provided tonight by National Theatre Opera soloist Jana Sibera in a concert programme under the Zlín Philharmonic Orchestra's Chief Conductor Robert Kružík.