MONDAY, MAY 11

SPECIAL PROGRAM: Joyce DiDonato performs songs by Alma and Gustav Mahler

The acclaimed, versatile American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato joins the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra for a program of songs by a young Alma Schindler and her future husband Gustav Mahler.

The daughter of the Viennese landscape-painter Emil Schindler, Alma Schindler possessed significant talent as both a pianist and composer however, while being courted by the ambitious young composer and conductor Gustav Mahler she acquiesced to his demand that she should stop composing. “I cried the whole night”, Alma later wrote in her autobiography. The group of five songs on this program were most probably composed just prior to their marriage. The first of them, “Die stille Stadt” (“The quiet town”) sets a poem by Richard Dehmel, whose poem “Transfigured Night” inspired the young composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was later to create his highly influential “twelve-tone” composition method, to write his early masterpiece of the same name. Schoenberg himself commented to Alma after a performance of these songs in Vienna, “A pity you didn’t continue that work. It would certainly have led somewhere.”

Joyce DiDonato also sings Gustav Mahler’s settings of the poetry of the nineteenth-century poet and professor in Asian languages Friedrich Rückert, composed around the time of his marriage to Alma in March 1902. Mahler felt a great affinity with the sentiments expresses in Rückert’s verse, to the extent of exclaiming “It is truly me” after reading the poem “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I have lost touch with the world”), which ends with the stanza “I live alone in my heaven, in my devotion, in my song.”This melancholic composer, who often felt his music to be misunderstood by the hawkish Viennese musical cognoscenti, also wrote an impassioned setting of Rückert’s “At midnight”, in which the author awakes in the middle of the night and, after looking heavenward found that “no image of light brought me consolation.” Although these songs were not conceived as a cycle per se, they are still regarded as some of Mahler’s finest.

Live performance recording from October 10th, 2025, at the Theatre des Champs-Elyees, Paris. Courtesy of the European Broadcasting Union.

Program
Richard Strauss: Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24; TrV 158
Alma Mahler: Five Songs
Gustav Mahler: Rückert-Lieder
Richard Strauss: Don Juan, Op. 20; TrV 156

Artists
Joyce DiDonato (mezzo-soprano)
Orchestre National de France
Cristian Măcelaru (conductor)

192K MP3
[occasionally skips material in transmission]

SPECIAL PROGRAM: Bruno de Sá singt in höchsten Tönen

Bruno de Sá, Sopranist
Evgeny Sviridov und Anna Dmitrieva, Violine
Gabrielle Kancachian, Viola
Marco Testori, Violoncello
Kit Scotney, Kontrabass
Olga Watts, Cembalo
Blockflöte und Leitung: Dorothee Oberlinger
(aufgenommen am 15. Juli in der Helmut List Halle in Graz im Rahmen der "Styriarte 2024") (1 hr., 30 min.)

Ooperiõhtu: Bellini "Uneskõndija" [La Sonnambula] Metropolitanist

Peale võidukaid esinemisi "Romeo ja Julia", "La Traviata" ja "Lucia di Lammermoori" peaosades vallutab Nadine Sierra sopranirepertuaari uue tipu Amina rollis, kes kõnnib unes Bellini liigutavas loos kaotatud ja leitud armastusest.
Stuudios on Anne Aavik.

Metropolitani lavastuses säilitab staartenor Rolando Villazon ooperi algupärase miljöö Šveitsi Alpides, kuid kasutab kuutõbist süžeed inimhinge emotsionaalsetesse ja psühholoogilistesse sügavikesse kaevumiseks.

Osades:

Amina - Nadine Sierra
Lisa - Sydney Mancasola
Elvino - Xabier Anduaga
Rodolfo - Alexander Vinogradov
Alessio - Nicholas Newton
Teresa - Deborah Nansteel
Notar - Scott Scully
Metropolitani koor
Metropolitani orkester
dirigent Riccardo Frizza

"Ooperiõhtu" on eetris esmaspäeval, 11. mail kell 19 (3 hrs.)