Odyssey Festival Orchestra: Berg & R. Strauss

TITLE: Odyssey Festival Orchestra --- SUBTITLE: Magic Mountains: Two Responses to War --- DATE/TIME: Tuesday 22 September 2026, 7.30pm --- EVENT COPY: In 1915, the young Alban Berg and the 50-year-old Richard Strauss completed major orchestral works. Both were responses to the Great War that had broken out in mainland Europe. Both required an enormous orchestra. And both were influenced by mountains. Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces, composed in his own Alpine retreat, attempted to rewrite the very language of Western harmony in the face of the crumbling power of Imperial Vienna. Strauss' Alpine Symphony, however, was a retreat into nostalgia, a vivid evocation of a childhood walk in the Alps that was also symbolic of the individual's eternal power. In this concert, the two pieces are linked by narrated passages evoking writer Thomas Mann's response to the same moment in history, drawn fro