Weimar Berlin: Angels and Demons

A riveting programme of music from Weimar-era composers that both looks back to history for inspiration and draws connections with the art of the period.

Composers, artists and writers were intimately connected in the creative ferment of the Weimar Republic. Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus School in 1919, had a daughter – Manon. When she died of polio, aged just 18, Alban Berg was spurred to dedicate his new Violin Concerto, with its haunting chorale by JS Bach, ‘to the memory of an angel’.

Hindemith’s Symphony: Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter) reaches even further back into the past. Inspired by the sometimes-demonic 16th century tableaux of Matthias Grünewald, Hindemith’s Symphony echoes the work of visual artists from his own period, like Otto Dix, who drew on the style and techniques of the giants of Renaissance German art, including Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Dürer.