MIKKO FRANCK

Finnish conductor Mikko Franck, Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, is one of the most acclaimed conductors of our time. He regularly works with major orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony. A composer who often features in his programmes and recordings is Richard Strauss. And it is Strauss who is the subject of his first concert at the Palau de les Arts. The evening includes the final scene of the opera Capriccio, and before that the composer's last work, the Vier Letzte Lieder, a cycle of captivating expressive beauty and overwhelming lyricism: songs to nature, love, life and death, given voice here by the soprano Elsa Dreisig. The composer already had a presentiment of his end, and in the tone poem Death and Transfiguration evokes the theme of transfiguration written in his youth, which presents death as a life lived to the fullest.