Schoenberg and Mahler

The evening

Venture to the edge of tonality with Schoenberg’s romantic and highly charged tone poem, and hear one of Mahler’s most emotionally wide-ranging creations.

Based on a symbolist poem by Richard Dehmel and featuring music of yearning and sensuous beauty, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht paints a shimmering portrait of a moonlit forest where a woman confesses to her lover that she is pregnant by another man. His acceptance of the child as his own brings about the ‘transfigured night’.

Mahler’s Seventh is perhaps the most emotionally complex of his nine symphonies. Its two vast outer movements bracket a nightmarish Scherzo full of extraordinary colour, and two ‘songs of the night’ that offer contrasting visions of darkness. And in one of his most exciting finales, Mahler plucks us from the gloom to bathe us in glorious light.

The LSO is steered through this post-Romantic programme by the acclaimed Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, an artist renowned for coaxing huge canvasses of sound from the podium.