Metamorphosen, TrV 290 by Strauss, Symphony No. 14, Op. 135 by Shostakovich, -tól (2022/2022), Karmester Teodor Currentzis, Samara State Philharmonic Society, Samara, Russia

The musicAeterna orchestra's program combines two late masterpieces of the Russian and German classics of the 20th century: the symphonic etude Metamorphoses by Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony. The main theme of both works is reflections on death and transfiguration. The score of the Fourteenth Symphony was created by Dmitri Shostakovich in just over a month in the winter of 1969, when he underwent planned but unsuccessful treatment in the hospital. The Fourteenth Symphony, dedicated to Benjamin Britten, is an extremely unusual cycle. It has eleven parts for two soloists (soprano and bass) and a small string orchestra with a reinforced percussion group. Each part is an independent vocal-symphonic scene. All parts of the symphony are connected by a common dramatic logic - from a frenzied tragic protest against everything that breaks human destinies, souls and lives, to restrained and concentrated grief. Richard Strauss wrote the symphonic study "Metamorphoses" in the last months of World War II and finished in April 1945. This work became one of the composer's later masterpieces. In "Metamorphoses" it is customary to hear the composer's shock from the bombing of Dresden, Munich and Vienna, which turned into an elegy for the memory of a destroyed culture. There is a recognizable motif from Wagner's Tristan, a theme hinting at the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, numerous allusions to the music of Bach, the Viennese classics and Strauss' own early compositions. During the 25–30 minutes of this composition, a kind of alchemical act takes place in the polyphonized flesh of the score: the transformation of darkness into light, sorrow into enlightenment.