Nielsen 2 & Jean-Guihen Queyras plays Strauss

Associate conductor Michael Schønwandt has long been an ambassador for Danish composer Carl Nielsen, and made celebrated recordings of all his symphonies and concertos. In this concert with the Belgian National Orchestra, he conducts the Second Symphony, a work Carl Nielsen wrote at the turn of the last century. Each movement of the Second Symphony expresses one of the four temperaments: choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic and sanguine. These personality traits were once defined by the Greek physician Hippocrates and inspired many works of art, including  a woodcut Carl Nielsen saw hanging in a Danish pub. Along with his wife and some friends, he initially laughed heartily at the caricatured figures that were supposed to symbolise the four temperaments. But a few weeks later, Nielsen still had not forgotten them and eventually dedicated an entire symphony to them.

A sanguine melancholic, that is how Don Quixote could be described. In 1897, Richard Strauss decided to dedicate a symphonic poem to this literary anti-hero conceived by Cervantes. With the cello as the main character, Richard Strauss ingeniously translated Don Quixote's adventures into music. Together with his sidekick Sancho Panza, sometimes voiced by the solo viola, sometimes by the tenor tuba or bass clarinet, the nobleman whose brain has been affected by lack of sleep and reading too many chivalric romances fights against sheep, windmills and clerics. Strauss' colourful, virtuoso composition is at times maddening, at other times deeply moving – for instance, when Don Quixote dreams of his great love, the beautiful Dulcinea.

Created with the support of the Belgian Tax Shelter through Casa Kafka Pictures.