After last season’s performance of Zemlinsky’s spellbinding telling of the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Honorary Conductor Edward Gardner returns for Zemlinsky’s last work in the late Romantic Viennese tradition – his Lyric Symphony. In this setting of seven pieces of Hindu poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, the composer unfurls a salient study in human relationships in which soprano and baritone soloists present female and male archetypes. The result is an alluring, mysterious, sexy slice of late Romantic lusciousness in which the soloists drape their alternate verses over a kaleidoscopic orchestra. Regulars at the great opera houses of central Europe, Camilla Nylund and Alexander Grassauer, are the soloists.

Until he married Zemlinsky’s former girlfriend, Gustav Mahler had been the composer’s mentor and confidante. Years later, facing death with a stoicism that edged him towards catharsis, Mahler sketched a tenth symphony that would remain unfinished. Its Adagio is music of beauty and deceptive strength, whose hushed, inward beauty can appear to suspend time.