Oxford Lieder Festival: Four Last Songs: Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton

Carolyn Sampson (described by The Times as having a ‘purity of tone matched by her dramatic ability to inhabit the spirit of each song in the cycle as though it were a perfectly contained world’) and regular duo partner Joseph Middleton ('the cream of the new generation') perform songs by Haydn (Arianna a Naxos), the young Schoenberg, and Gustav Mahler. After the interval, we hear Debussy’s Trois chansons de Bilitis, entering the sensuous and suggestive world of Pan and the dryads, and then Richard Strauss’s monumental Four Last Songs.

Explore Debussy's musical responses to Pierre Louÿs's Les chansons de Bilitis at this afternoon's rush-hour concert.