Yamada & Selaocoe

»The sick man is lying in slumber in bed, breathing heavily and irregularly«, wrote Richard Strauss of his tone poem ›Tod und Verklärung‹. »The fever causes his limbs to shiver […] his childhood flashes past him.« At the end of this metaphysical composition, the protagonist’s soul leaves his body. In his ›Verklärte Nacht‹, which still resonates Late Romanticism, Arnold Schönberg stages the facets of the human psyche. Fazıl Say’s ›Never Give Up‹, by contrast, urges us out of passivity: In this concerto, the composer was reacting to the terror attacks in Europe and Turkey in the 2010s – a passio