Esa-Pekka Salonen: Mahler and Schumann

Programme

Named Young Artist of the Year 2018 by Gramophone, hailed as “inordinately talented” (What’s on Stage) and described as “probably the most spectacular voice the Proms will hear all season” in 2017 (Telegraph), soprano Lise Davidsen has made a meteoric rise to the top of her profession.

She joins leading British baritone Christopher Maltman in Mahler’s Humoresken, a collection of settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

One of the preoccupations of the German Romantics was the collection, adaptation, or simply invention of folk poetry, thought to hold the key to an authentic national identity untarnished by modern, industrial, urban life. In the early 1800s two leading Romantic writers published Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a large and popular collection of such poems that inspired settings by many composers over the ensuing century, most famously Mahler. His richly-scored songs paint vivid sound-pictures of country scenes, love and military life.

The last symphony Schumann wrote, the Rhenish was inspired by a happy holiday with his wife Clara. The second movement evokes the broad, peacefully flowing river, the fourth, with its sombre brass chorales, tells of a ceremony the couple witnessed in Cologne Cathedral, and the work ends in celebratory mood.