It’s not just in their ensemble photo that the Junge Symphoniker Hamburg can be seen standing deep in water. In their summer concert conducted by Daniel Kirchmann, they now also plunge musically into the waves: the program features Alexander von Zemlinsky’s lushly effervescent orchestral fantasy »Die Seejungfrau« (The Mermaid) and Antonín Dvořák’s mysteriously seething symphonic poem »Der Wassermann« (The Water Goblin). Both works allow legends of fairy-tale (under)water creatures to merge with the waves of late Romantic orchestral sound.
In his inimitable style, Dvořák told the old Bohemian horror story of the water sprite who kidnaps a girl, impregnates her, and finally kills their child shortly before the turn of the century. Naturally, this was accompanied by dark and dramatic orchestral colors – but not without the usual dose of folk verve.
A few years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander von Zemlinsky wanted to show that even predecessors such as Richard Strauss had not yet exhausted the art of creating captivating, brilliantly orchestrated program music for orchestra. He chose Hans Christian Andersen’s world-famous fairy tale »The Little Mermaid« as the basis for this compositional challenge. He mastered the task of translating a water nymph’s unfulfilled longing for human love into passionately indulgent, pictorial music with flying colors—better than his own unhappy affair with Alma Mahler, which he processed in »Die Seejungfrau« (The Mermaid).
PERFORMERS
Junge Symphoniker Hamburg orchestra
Daniel Kirchmann conductor
PROGRAM
»Unter Wasser«
Antonín Dvořák
Der Wassermann
Alexander von Zemlinsky
The Mermaid
