Soprano Marlis Petersen received her fourth(!) award as “Singer of the Year” 2020 among others for her interpretation of Salome at the Theater an der Wien. And it is this role which she will be performing for our delectation at the 10th Symphony concert. With Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Richard Strauss’ opera Salome, the orchestra provides the prelude to her ecstatic final aria. In Alban Berg’s “Seven Early Songs”, Marlis Petersen alternates between Romantic and atonal sounds while performing seven poems by poets ranging from Theodor Storm to Rainer Maria Rilke set to music.
All the works in this programme date from the first decade of the 20th century, including Florent Schmitt’s symphonic poem “La Tragédie de Salomé”. The similarity to Igor Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”, which premiered just two weeks earlier in 1913 at the Champs-Élysées theatre in Paris, is unmistakable. Stravinsky was certainly impressed by the work as he told Florent Schmitt in a letter dated 23 February 1912: “God, how fine it is! It is one of the greatest masterpieces of modern music”.