Salonen & Grigorian in music by Strauss & Bruckner

Unconventional is often the case in Streich’s musical universe, where the orchestra’s usual instruments may be mixed with sounds from egg slicers, garden hoses, or a bicycle. Lisa Streich was born in 1985 in Norra Råda, Värmland, but now lives on Gotland, 500 meters from the waves of the Baltic Sea. She has collaborated with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Elbphilharmonie. For the latter, she wrote Flügel, which premiered at the Elbphilharmonie Visions festival in 2023.

Sometimes complaints are heard from ensembles or conductors because they are forced to leave their academic teachings behind.
– Lisa Streich

Sculptural sounds and ‘moldy’ chords

Streich’s sound creations can be likened to her directing the musicians; she sculpts with sounds and ensembles to achieve the often visual idea that underpins the composition. The works often have short names like ‘Socker’ (Sugar), ‘Segel’ (Sail), or in this case ‘Flügel’ (Wing). In it, she conjures a winged creature on stage, where one wing moves in the high register and the other in the low. The surging choreography in the orchestra is disrupted by a delicate little contrapuntal movement that wanders from one musician to another. This deliberately skewed element creates an itching impurity, a distortion that Streich calls ‘moldy’ chords.

Strauss’s tender farewell

An aging couple watches the sunset and wonders if it could be Death. An 80-year-old Richard Strauss read Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem Aftonrodnad and could probably relate. He set it to music along with three poems by Hermann Hesse for soprano and orchestra, which became his last compositions. In 1950, a year after his death, the songs were performed under the title chosen by his publisher: Vier letzte Lieder. Strauss did not choose the order in which they are performed, but it has a logic. The pieces get longer, the tempo slower, and the emotional waves subside with each song. The music slowly fades away.

Strauss had already composed over 200 lieder for his wife Pauline de Ahna, and even the challenging Vier letzte Lieder were tailored to her timbre, range, and capacity. Richard’s father, Franz Strauss, also receives a dedication in the song cycle’s prominent horn parts – an instrument his father played. At the end of Im Abendrot, just at the question of whether it is Death, Strauss quotes his own theme from Tod und Verklärung, written 60 years earlier. Thus, he summarizes the essential components of the life he lived. The sense of Strauss’s premonition of his near end is overwhelming, but he portrays it without fear. Vier letzte Lieder is a tender farewell to earthly life.

Bruckner’s romantic side

Anton Bruckner came from a village outside Linz where his family had been farmers for hundreds of years. With this simple upbringing and strong religiosity, he stood out on the streets of Vienna. He was marked by deep insecurity that affected his composing. Many wanted to help the master get his music performed and accepted by the musical establishment. They gave advice that led him to rework his pieces repeatedly. This was also the case with the Fourth Symphony, which underwent several changes between 1874 and 1880.

Eventually, the symphony was completed, and in it, Bruckner achieved his formal mastery. The composition has a magnificent architecture, like the cathedrals he, as a devout and skilled organist, spent so much time in. The Fourth Symphony is the closest we come to program music in Bruckner’s case. He gave it the title The Romantic, and to acquaintances, he also shared a small ‘program’ for the individual movements that gives us a picture of Bruckner’s inner world; horns sounding through the stillness of dawn, peasant festivals, knights on horseback, and hunting scenes in the forest, birdsong, and other medieval romance. The Fourth Symphony thus carries a unique combination of high technical skill and the worldview of a 19th-century Austrian peasant.

Text: Clara Mårtensson