(Leader, Laurance Turner )
Conductor, Sir John Barbirolli
Richard Strauss was always preoccupied with the problems of the conflicting claims of words and music in opera; and his last opera, Capriccio, dramatises this conflict in the persons of a poet, Olivier, and a musician, Flamand, who are rivals for the hand of the beautiful Countess Madeleine. In the opera-house the Prelude is played by a string sextet, and when the curtain rises it turns out to be a piece of music written by Flamand, which is being played on the stage and to which the Countess sits listening. Tonight it will be played by small string orchestra.
Delius's Fennimore and Gerda is also its composer's last opera. Based on the Danish writer Jacobsen's novel Niels Lyhne, it tells the story of the unhappy love between Niels and Fennimore. Towards the end of the opera the two lovers separate for ever; but two final scenes show Niels, three years afterwards, finding happiness in the love of a young girl called Gerda. The Intermezzo is made up of the orchestral preludes to these last two scenes.
Deryck Cooke