Transformed Lives | City of London Sinfonia

Join us for a programme of heavenly music inspired by lifechanging moments in the lives of the featured composers, in the beautiful surroundings of St John's Smith Square.

We start the evening with Webern’s Slow Movement, an emotionally charged piece which was inspired by a hiking holiday outside Vienna with Webern’s future wife. This stands in stark opposition to Strauss’s Oboe Concerto, written after World War II when Strauss met an American soldier who in civilian life was the principal oboist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

The programme also includes Mahler’s hauntingly beautiful Adagietto from his Symphony No 5, which the composer sent to his future wife Alma instead of a love letter. They were engaged a month later and married within the year.

The evening culminates with Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, in which a woman tells her partner that she is pregnant with another man’s child. Criticized at the time of publication for its content, which stood in stark contrast to Viennese morals, the poem is now a celebrated work of art, as is the music it inspired.