Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

In the first section of his vividly realised sound fresco “Feste romane” Ottorino Respighi leads his audience directly into the ancient Circus Maximus, where the Emperor Nero has a group of martyrs thrown to the lions: the strings take on their choral part, while clarinets, bassoons and trombones imitate the growls of the animals with naturalistic glissandi. By contrast, in his “Canti di vita e d’amore” from 1962, Luigi Nono rejected cruelty in any form, although all three parts are concerned with different aspects of violence and oppression and look for possible ways of counteracting criminal insanity. The bridge in Hiroshima referred to in the subtitle is one indication of this. Alongside these two works, Sir Donald Runnicles and the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin will also perform Act Four of Giuseppe Verdi’s tragic opera “Otello”, in which the hero (Otello), his unjustly accused wife (Desdemona) and a cold-blooded plotter (Iago) meet in a conventionally-gendered triangle. No other Italian opera composer of the 19th century dealt as ruthlessly with death in his stage works as Verdi: at the very beginning of his career he noted that opera should make its audience feel “tears, horror and death through singing.”  He undoubtledly succeeded in this in Act Four of “Otello”, where the orchestra plays a prominent part in its spellbinding effect: sombre chords in the deepest possible instrumental register leave no doubt at the end that the death of the fallen hero will bring no redemption.