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Mahler with the Orchestre de Paris at the Granada Festival

On July 5, Thomas Hampson performs at the Granada Festival for the first time with the Orchestre de Paris led by Pablo Heras-Casado. As Director of the Granada Festival, Heras-Casado has dedicated the concert to the 150th anniversary of the epochal French composer, Hector Berlioz. Regarded as one of the premiere interpreters of Mahler’s songs, Hampson will perform selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Listen to the festival live via RTVE. For more information about the Granada Festival, click here.

Also on the program is Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique, which was inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1901 essay “La Vie des Abeilles” (The Life of Bees), and concluding the concert is Berlioz’s epic Symphonie fantastique, a work that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination, who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless, unrequited love. Widely regarded as a self-portrait of Berlioz, Leonard Bernstein described the symphony as the first musical expedition into psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature.