11. Symphoniekonzert: Regula Mühlemann Singt Strauss by Strauss, Brahms, Fra (2023/2023), Dirigent Petr Popelka, Casino Bern, Berne, Switzerland

At the opening of the 2020/21 season, Regula Mühlemann sang her way into the hearts of the Bernese - due to the weather in the casino instead of on the Bundesplatz - and now she is returning to the shores of the Aare. The Lucerne-born singer, who is now causing an international sensation, recently performed the role of Echo in Richard Strauss' opera Ariadne auf Naxos at La Scala in Milanembodied. So it is only logical that she now turns to the "Four Last Songs" by the same composer. Conductor Petr Popelka - from 2022/23 head of the radio orchestra in his hometown of Prague - has recently been increasingly concerned with this composer. Strauss, who lived in Switzerland from 1945 until shortly before his death, wrote the four songs to texts by Eichendorff and Hesse in 1948, but he did not live to see the premiere. When he was young, Strauss had been Kapellmeister at the theater in Meiningen, the capital of Thuringia. There he also met Johannes Brahms, who was almost thirty years his senior, and who repeatedly performed his own works with the famous Meiningen court orchestra, including the fourth symphony. Composed in 1884 during a summer vacation in Styria,