Performers
Programme
This season's symphony concerts also feature works by important female composers. Salome, Ophelia and Cleopatra are three femmes de légende selected and orchestrated by the French composer Mel Bonis from her piano cycle of the same name. Her real name was Mélanie Bonis, but at a time when women were not allowed to compose, she published her works under the neutral pseudonym Mel to be on the safe side. The cycle, written over a period of almost 50 years, ranges from French piano romanticism to Impressionism.
Richard Strauss portrayed his own wife and heroine within the family in the domestic symphony, Symphonia domestica. Like the symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben, which was premiered at the museum concerts, Symphonia domestica has autobiographical traits and is a fantasy about Strauss's family life: Visits from relatives, quarrels and disputes within the family, but reconciliation at the end.
A master of the cello is the young Salzburg-born Julia Hagen, who makes her debut in our concerts with Camille Saint-Saëns' First Cello Concerto. The work is considered a 'pearl' among cello concertos. Great composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Rachmaninov considered it to be the best cello concerto ever written. We will abstain from this judgement and look forward to a masterpiece of the cello concerto genre.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)