‘ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA’: from the symphonic poems that brought Richard Strauss worldwide fame in the 1880s and 1890s and his florid operas from the first decade of the twentieth century to the resigned metamorphosis of his final masterpieces after the Second World War. In this production, Mariss Jansons is seizing the opportunity to pay tribute with this work, considered to be one of his specialities, to that other big name from the orchestra’s early history. Also on the programme: Strauss’ METAMORPHOSEN and the SUITE FROM DER ROSENKAVALIER.
Mariss Jansons conducts Brahms’ Requiem
‘Ich will euch trösten’ (I will comfort you), sings the soprano in Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. Indeed, this is music of comfort, not of lamentation. With this work, Mariss Jansons is continuing the Requiem ritual started in 2011 to allow listeners to contemplate the transience of life at the beginning of autumn. Rather than using the standard Latin mass text, however, Brahms selected his own text from the Bible. He completed the work after the death of his mother. Following the premiere, the music critic Hanslick wrote, ‘Since Bach’s Mass in B minor and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, nothing in this vein has been written which is comparable to Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem.’ It was this work, which became immensely popular, that truly established Brahms as a composer.