Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’

Live at the BBC Proms: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conductor Paweł Kapuła and soprano Natalya Romaniw perform music by Strauss, Schubert, Henze and Mahler.

Presented by Andrew McGregor, live from the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Henze: Erlkönig – orchestral fantasy
Schubert: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, ‘Unfinished’

c.8.10pm
Interval: Dame Hermione Lee has written biographies of literary figures like Virginia Woolf, Tom Stoppard, Edith Wharton and now Anita Brookner, so she has spent time considering last words, last wishes and the objects people cherish.

c.8.30pm
Mahler: What the Wild Flowers Tell Me (arr. Benjamin Britten)
Strauss: Four Last Songs

Natalya Romaniw, soprano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Paweł Kapuła, conductor

Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’, one of at least three symphonies he left incomplete at his death, is one of his most popular, combining private drama with lyrical sweetness. The same composer’s alarming song ‘Erlkönig’ inspired Hans Werner Henze to create his vivid orchestral fantasy evoking a terrifying, supernatural night-ride. ‘My new god’ was what Benjamin Britten discovered on hearing his first Mahler symphony soon after leaving school. His arrangement of ‘What the Wild Flowers Tell Me’, the second movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, reclothes a piece inspired by the abundant blooms around the Austrian composer’s lakeside composing hut by the Swiss Alps. First performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1950, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is the composer’s achingly nostalgic musical farewell.