Cancelled: Nina Stemme sings Strauss

A guest performance by the Gothenburg Symphony featuring the stunningly beautiful Vier letzte Lieder.

Nina Stemme is one of Sweden’s most internationally acclaimed dramatic sopranos. She regularly sings on the world’s most prestigious opera stages: the Vienna State Opera, London Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, La Scala in Milan, Metropolitan Opera in New York and the operas in Frankfurt and Zürich. She has performed at Konserthuset Stockholm on multiple occasions, most recently in 2019 when she participated in Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.

Now we will get to hear her together with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Richard Strauss’ beautiful Vier letzte Lieder, Four Last Songs. With certainty about his approaching death, Strauss imbued the songs with a rare, light sense of sadness that has enchanted people ever since the world premiere in 1950. The songs were the last pieces of music Strauss ever completed.

We will also hear Shostakovich’s audacious Symphony No. 4. It was composed in the mid-1930s, just as he was being attacked by Joseph Stalin, and amidst the growing political pressure on artists. The piece was supposed to have had its world premiere in Leningrad in 1936, but after the first rehearsal, the whole thing was cancelled – officially, because Shostakovich withdrew it. Other, more politically digestible and conventional symphonies were composed thereafter, but it took until 1961 for Symphony No. 4 to finally see its world premiere in Moscow. The influences of Mahler are evident in this music.