7. Symphony Concert

With Claude Debussy’s impressionist masterpiece , which captures the fleeting images of dancing nymphs in shimmering summer air from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem about the afternoon of a faun, the up-and-coming Portuguese conductor Miguel Sepúlveda makes his debut with the Staatsorchester Stuttgart. A hub of the artistic elite in Paris, to which Debussy also belonged, was the salon of composer Ernest Chausson. His late-Romantic song cycle , set to poems by his friend Maurice Bouchor about the loss of a great love, will be performed in this concert by soprano Natasha Te Rupe-Wilson, a member of the Staatsoper Stuttgart ensemble. The delicate scent of lilacs and the glistening of the vast sea, in which the love of the lyrical narrator is reflected, come to life through Chausson’s luminous orchestration. The by the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff are also rich in color. In this final work, written in 1940 while in exile in the United States, Rachmaninoff seems to look back on his life through quotations from his earlier works and bid farewell to the world.