Kent Nagano conducts Britten, Pärt, and R. Strauss

Three seminal composers open an existential dialogue on life, death, and isolation in this stunning program conducted by the celebrated Kent Nagano. Trumpeters Gilles Mercier, Jean-Pierre Odasso, and Javier Rossetto begin the concert with Britten’s dramatic Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury, before the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France perform Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten: a beautiful string elegy mourning the great British composer's death. A magnificent rendition of the sextet from Richard Strauss’s Capriccio—the beginning of Strauss’s final opera—follows suit, and the reflective atmosphere returns once more with Pärt’s meditative Spiegel im Spiegel. The program draws to a close with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses, written in the final few months of the Second World War.