Nina Stemme's Recital

Nina Stemme : soprano
Magnus Svensson : piano

Richard Wagner, Kurt Weill, Sigurd von Koch, Gustav Mahler

Nina Stemme, the greatest Isolde of her generation, is also an exceptional recitalist, equally at home with the Wesendonck-Lieder in which the figure of Isolde was conceived, as with the visionary modernism of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder or the ironic detachment of Kurt Weill. For her return to the Grand Théâtre, the Swedish soprano introduces us to one of her little-known compatriots, Sigurd von Koch, a contemporary of Mahler, whose cycle Die geheimnisvolle Flöte (“The Mysterious Flute”) is a symbolist anthology of classical Chinese poems. Friedrich Rückert, the poet chosen by Mahler for his ‘Songs on the Death of Children’, had lost two of his own to scarlet fever. Nina Stemme will perform this difficult exercise of seemingly impossible grief and anguish, deluded by fantastical hope and which nevertheless ends in the peacefulness of transcendence.

Programme on GTG.ch !