Cambridge Summer Music Festival 2023

Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs

Friday 21 July, 1pm

Pembroke Auditorium

(By kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College)

Elinor Rolfe Johnson soprano
Ian Tindale piano

Richard Strauss
Vier Letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs)
Frühling
September
Beim schlafengehen
Im Abendrot

Alma Mahler
Vier Lieder (Four songs)
Licht in der Nacht
Waldseligkeit
Ansturm
Erntelied

Gustav Mahler
Rückert-Lieder (Songs after Rückert) 
Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder
Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft
Um Mitternacht
Liebst du um Schönheit
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Praised by the Guardian for her ‘superlative singing’, Elinor Rolfe Johnson and her regular collaborator Ian Tindale (both Cambridge graduates) return to the city with a programme of some of the finest Lieder of the 20th Century.

Linked throughout her life to famous men – not least her first husband Gustav Mahler – Alma Mahler was much more than a passive muse. Intelligent, witty and beautiful, she was musically gifted in her own right. For this concert her songs from 1911 sit between two song cycles originally written for voice and orchestra by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.

One of Strauss’s final works, and arguably one of his most loved, Vier Letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) received its premiere in London in 1950, the year after Strauss died. Mahler’s Rückert Lieder (Songs after Rückert) date from the turn of the century and show an astonishing range of emotion. This celebrated duo present them in their intimate arrangements for piano, in one of Cambridge’s newest venues.

Tickets: £12 plus booking fee
(Half price for 25 years and under)

BOOKING OPENS for Friends of CSM 9.00am Friday May 5

GENERAL BOOKING opens 9.00am Friday May 12