Lorenzo Viotti conducts Poulenc, Debussy, and Zemlinsky

Charismatic Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti leads the gold-standard Vienna Philharmonic in a triptych of evocative orchestral suites at the orchestra's home venue, the storied Golden Hall of the Wiener Musikverein. First up is a full-fledged menagerie in the suite from Francis Poulenc's Les Animaux modèles, a ballet inspired by La Fontaine's fables and created during World War II with subtle messages of resistance. Claude Debussy's Printemps, rewritten after the first edition was lost in a fire, traces "the slow and labored birth of beings and things in nature, their gradual blossoming, and finally the joy of being born into some new life." Finally, we are treated to Alexander Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), an enchanting Strauss-like fantasy in three movements into which the composer poured his heartache upon being spurned by Alma Schindler, who had just become Alma Mahler. Not long after the work's 1905 premiere in this same concert hall, Die Seejungfrau was withdrawn by the composer and presumed lost for decades, only to be rediscovered by two Ph.D. students in the 1980s and become one Zemlinsky's most popular and enduring works.

Photo © Dutch National Opera / Danielle van Coevorden