This concert programme is based around the theme of "death and transfiguration". It all sounds fairly dark, but the three composers featured here saw death as a journey to a better place.  Click here to listen

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Masonic Funeral Music (1785)
Conductor: Jean-Claude Casadesus

This music was wirtten in memory of two of Mozarts's fellow masons, Duke George August of Mecklenburg- Strelitz and Count Franz Veith Edler von Galantha.

Mozart's music is frequently characterized by an underlying darkness and sense of tragedy. This often revealed when Mozart suddenly lurches from happy music into deeply unfamiliar territory, a musical habit which is evident throughout the 40th Symphony. It's almost seems that he is trying to expose the rot under a pretty facade, although whether that facade is his or ours is open to question.

The Masonic Funeral Music is much more conventionally dark to begin with, proceeding in a minor key for the majority of the piece. However, the concept of transfiguration is exemplified by the ending, on a glowing major chord.

During Mozart's time, it was not accepted practice to write programme music that followed a story, but instead it was more common to write music with an appropriate tone for the occasion. As such, the 'happy ending'  of this piece is more representative of a gesture of hopefulness, rather  than a direct depiction of the journey to heaven.

Richard Strauss
Tod und Verklarung (1888-9)
Conductor: Klaus Weise

Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration) was described by Strauss as a Tondichtung (tone poem). This term describes a piece that tells a story or communicates an idea, generally composed in one movement. Strauss wrote a number of tone poems including Don Juan, Macbeth, Don Quixote, Also Sprach Zarathustra and Till Eulenspiegel's Lustige Streiche.

Strauss's music is characterized by its dense and colourful orchestration, and requires very large orchestras. The technical skill of the players is tested to the limit in his quest for new and exciting sounds.

Like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Tod und Verklarung depicts an episode in the life of an artist. Whilst with Berlioz, the artist's visions appear either through a dream or intoxication, with Strauss, the visions are those of the artist at the point of death. He lies on his deathbed recalling his youthful idealism before dying and being transformed in a kind of metaphorical heaven.

Strauss took the depiction of real events in his music very seriously. In Don Juan there is an oboe solo which he maintained obviously depicts a woman, and that you can tell she has red hair!

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 2 The Resurrection (1894)
Conductor: Jean-Claude Casadesus

Many composers have been captivated by the concept of rebirth, and many have addressed it in their music, but few did so quite as literally or on such such a large scale as Mahler.

At the time it was written, Mahler's second symphony called for about the largest orchestra ever assembled, along with a huge choir and a whole brass section positioned off-stage. It received a hostile reaction from critics at it's first performance, although this is understandable if you consider that they had never heard anything on this scale before and simply did not know how to react.

Parts of the symphony sound very much like modern film music, which is astounding given that it was written in 1894, the year before Louis Lumiere is said to have invented the film  camera.

The overall shape of the piece (which is more than 80 minutes long) is supposed to represent the death of Christ, his resurrection and ascension to heaven. The chorus sing the poems Auferstehung by Friedich Gottlieb Klopstock and Urlicht, taken from an anthology of German folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

This anthology provided texts for many of Mahler's vocal works. It was collected by Achim von Armin and Clemens von Brentano and was published in 1805.