Performance

Metamorphosen

3 upcoming performances in New York

Richard Strauss’s *Metamorphosen* is a late wartime score for 23 independent string parts, written in 1944–45 as Europe’s cultural infrastructure was collapsing. It unfolds as a continuous elegy, built from interlaced lines rather than orchestral mass, and it lasts roughly half an hour. The work is often heard as Strauss’s reckoning with loss and the fragility of artistic memory; its restraint is its argument. In this program at David Geffen Hall, it sits in dialogue with Poulenc’s *La Voix humaine*, another study in ruin, but on an intimate human scale.