The programme features two late 20th-century masterpieces in which music becomes a vessel of memory and reflection.
Richard Strauss completed Metamorphosen in the spring of 1945, witnessing the cultural heart of Germany vanish under the devastation of war. The work unfolds as an unbroken river of sound for 23 solo strings, each voice contributing to a collective elegy. Goethe’s idea of “metamorphosis” proves pivotal: sorrow does not stagnate but flows, transforms, and seeks—however faintly—hope. In the final bars, the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica emerges; above these notes Strauss writes In memoriam in the manuscript, bidding farewell to a world that had disappeared.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 for soprano, bass, strings, and percussion—one of his most personal works—confronts death without embellishment. The composer dedicated it to his friend Benjamin Britten, recognising their shared concern for human dignity in the face of violence and arbitrary power. Setting poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rilke, the symphony speaks of human vulnerability and the fine line between despair and the soul’s uprising.
Hearing these two works together is a profound experience.