Metamorfosis

As part of its Chamber Music Series, the Auditorio de Tenerife is hosting the Metamorphosis concert by the Wien Dresden Ensemble, made up of members of the Vienna Philharmonic and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden. Musicians from both orchestras will perform a programme featuring works by Schönberg and Strauss.

The Vienna Philharmonic and the Staatskapelle Dresden are among the world’s most important, renowned, and long-standing orchestras. These institutions and their members share a long history of musical exchange. Over the years, this has included numerous joint projects, reciprocal visits, and shared traditions. These qualities have brought the music of the two cities together, making them nearly inseparable.

The musicians of these orchestras share the same musical baggage and wish to live intensely, delighting audiences with performances given at the highest level in smaller ensembles than their respective orchestras will allow. In this regard, their goal is to perform before a select audience that will appreciate an intimate, special, and unique musical atmosphere.

Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, is among the composer’s first masterpieces to revolutionise the musical panorama of the early 20th century. He composed the work in the autumn of 1899 while visiting his composition teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky, in the Lower Austrian village of Payerbach. As a work of programme music, it is based on Richard Dehmel’s poem “Verklärte Nacht”, published in 1896 in the collection “Weib und Welt“, although Schönberg expressly requested the poem’s omission from concert programmes.

Metamorphosen: Study for 23 Solo Strings—on this occasion, arranged for seven musicians by Rudolf Leopold, based on composer Richard Strauss’s original sketches—was composed by Strauss in 1945 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and is his last orchestral work. Premiering in Zurich, it was dedicated to the famous arts patron Paul Sacher. Shortly before the end of the Second World War, amid human and cultural devastation, Strauss considered his composition the culmination of his career and a farewell to a world in ruins. His despondency is reflected at several levels in this profound and deeply intimate work. For example, in its last few bars, the lower voices quote the first theme from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the D minor key of which is employed at the end of Metamorphosen.