Three powerful works explore beauty, desire and loss in strikingly different ways.
A fleeting and vivid portrait of spring, “D’un matin de printemps” offers one of the few glimpses of Lili Boulanger’s remarkable talent, written shortly before her untimely death at the age of 24.
The final scene from Richard Strauss’s “Salome” tells a shocking story of obsession in which the young princess, having demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter, sings it a rapturous and unhinged love song.
Zemlinsky’s “Die Seejungfrau“, an emotionally rich and fantastically orchestrated tone poem, is a rarely performed gem. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid, it conjures the majesty of the ocean and doomed love with sumptuous orchestral colours.