Barbara Hannigan conducts Haydn, Vivier, Ligeti, and Strauss — With Aphrodite Patoulidou

The program begins with Haydn's Symphony No. 44 in E minor, known as the Trauersinfonie ("Mourning Symphony"), an energetic and haunting reflection of the Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") artistic currents of the late 18th century. Next is the best known work by French composer Claude Vivier, Lonely Child, a 1980 work of "astonishing fragility and beauty" for soprano and orchestra featuring the "utterly mesmerizing" Aphrodite Patoulidou (The Guardian). Hannigan and The Cleveland Orchestra then pay tribute to the great György Ligeti, born 100 years ago, with his eerie and captivating Lontano ("Far Away"), a prime example of the densely overlapping lines and tone clusters of what he called micropolyphony. The evening concludes, fittingly, with the supremely moving Death and Transfiguration, a meditation on the great beyond composed in 1889 by a 25-year-old Richard Strauss, to whose "Transfiguration" motif Strauss would return over six decades later in the Four Last Songs.