Celebrating life and death

Conductor Teodor Currentzis sees a silver lining to the COVID restrictions even when making music, and embraces the curveballs thrown by the pandemic.

Your ticket to the German classical music festival scene: Concert Hour has the picks of the season — two hours of music updated regularly. Along with host Rick Fulker, the musicians themselves are on hand to give their insights into the events and the music.

Part one

Exciting concert programs are guaranteed with the charismatic Greek-Russian conductor, Teodor Currentzis and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he's been principal conductor since last year.

Pandemic or not, it worked: the season opener in Stuttgart, with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja as artist in residence. Socially distancing the musicians onstage in the Stuttgart Lieder Hall was one way of adapting to the crisis. Currentzis sees an upside to that, saying "Music is always about challenges, difficulties and getting a better result. And maybe if all these difficulties didn't exist, we wouldn't be here in this amazing company with people who deeply love what they do."

In Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's 1673 composition Battalia (Battle), one can practically hear the gunfire. The piece begins at a nighttime camp. Having had too much to drink, inebriated soldiers sing in different keys —at the same time.

Then, it's off to battle. After Battalia, the musicians whisk us off directly to the sound world of Giacinto Scelsi, a 20th century Italian composer and poet whose motto was, "One must enter sound, penetrate it, capture it at every level of perception: physically, mentally, creatively." Scelsi's music, in fact, has a meditative effect.

Richard Strauss wrote a detailed program to his tone poem Death and Transfiguration. "The sick man lies slumbering, breathing laboriously and irregularly. Pleasant dreams conjure a smile on the sufferer. He awakens, tortured again by terrible pain. After the spell is over, he thinks about his past: childhood and youth with their struggles and passions. The pain returns. He sees the path of his life illuminated: an idea and an ideal he strove for but left unfinished because it could not be completed by a human being. Death. The soul leaves the body to find, in eternal space, that magnificent thing that he could not fulfill here below."

John Dowland

Weep You No More, Sad Fountains (2 singing voices, violins, chamber orchestra)

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber Battalia

Giacinto Scelsi

Anahit (lyric poem on the name of Venus)

Performed by:

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra

Teodor Currentzis, conductor

Recorded by Southwest German Radio in the Lieder Hall in Stuttgart on September 17, 2020

Richard Strauss

Death and Transfiguration, op. 24

Performed by:

Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra

Teodor Currentzis, conductor Recorded by Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra in the Lieder Hall in Stuttgart on February 14, 2020.

Rebroadcasting rights: one broadcast before February 21, 2020

Part two

This hour, Teodor Currentzis conducts a performance of Mahler's First Symphony.

"There is no limit to musical expression," said Richard Strauss after he had heard a symphony by Gustav Mahler.

Mahler's first symphony takes the listener from the inferno to paradise, or "Dall Inferno al Paradiso" as he wrote over the final movement. Before that, we have, in the composer's own words "from the days of youth, flowers, fruit and fragments of thorns, human comedy," and much more.

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 1 in D Major

Performed by:

Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra

Teodor Currentzis, conductor Recorded by Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra in the Lieder Hall in Stuttgart on on February 14, 2020.

Rebroadcasting rights: one broadcast before February 21, 2020