Lili Boulanger – D’un Matin de Printemps
Richard Strauss – Dance of the Seven Veils and Final Scene from Salome
Alexander von Zemlinsky – Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid)

Smith Square Hall, 7.30pm

Marc Dooley conductor
Tom Evans leader
Ella de Jongh soprano

Tickets £14, concessions £12, under-16s £9. Booking fees apply.

Three powerful works explore beauty, desire and loss in strikingly different ways.

A fleeting and vivid portrait of spring, “D’un matin de printemps” offers one of the few glimpses of Lili Boulanger’s remarkable talent, written shortly before her untimely death at the age of 24.

The final scene from Richard Strauss’s “Salome” tells a shocking story of obsession in which the young princess, having demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter, sings it a rapturous and unhinged love song.

Zemlinsky’s “Die Seejungfrau”, an emotionally rich and fantastically orchestrated tone poem, is a rarely performed gem. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid, it conjures the majesty of the ocean and doomed love with sumptuous orchestral colours.

British soprano Ella de Jongh is a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama Opera Course, where she studied under the tutelage of Professor Janice Chapman and coach Michael Pugh. Recent notable engagements include a live podcast recording for The Rest is History at the Royal Albert Hall, her debut with Regent’s Opera as Ortlinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, covering Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw with English National Opera, covering Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes with British Youth Opera, appearing in the chorus of La Bohème, and covering Wellgunde and the Third Norn in Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Longborough Festival Opera.