Programme Guide

Richard Strauss and his wife Pauline de Ahna, Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears, Luciano Berio and the vocal acrobat Cathy Berberian – composers have often written operatic roles or songs for the people with whom they shared their lives. A particularly moving example is the Neruda Songs by the American composer Peter Lieberson. He discovered the love sonnets by the Chilean national poet Pablo Neruda and set several of them to music for his second wife, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died much too young and whom the critic Jürgen Kesting called “the Maria Callas of Baroque song”. Kelley O’Connor was the soloist in this performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

David Zinman, conductor of this concert, caused a sensation during the 1990s with his complete recording of the Beethoven symphonies with Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra. This concert also ended with a composition by the Viennese classicist: his Seventh Symphony, which generated both enthusiasm and incomprehension at its premiere in 1813. The second movement had to be repeated for the ecstatic audience; the finale, on the other hand, caused Friedrich Wieck, who was present, to question the composer’s mental state. Beethoven does in fact transform the dancelike energy of his symphony into a wild frenzy at the close, which even after 200 years has lost none of its radical nature.