Metamorphosen - 1940s String Masterpieces

Clare Hammond piano
Britten Sinfonia

Britten Sinfonia’s celebrated strings perform three very different but equally striking works written in the mid-1940s.

Strauss’s Metamorphosen is one of his final, most moving pieces, while the works of Walton and Carwithen have a youthful vigour and optimism that stride out into a new, postwar world.

Richard Strauss’ devastatingly beautiful lament for his homeland was a heartfelt response to the destruction of German cities in the final months of World War Two. William Walton’s own wartime was dominated by writing film scores, but between 1945-7 he turned to the abstract purity of the string quartet. In the early 1970s, he reworked this taut, poignant work for orchestral strings. Only 26 when she finished the work in 1948, Doreen Carwithen brings elements of Waltonesque youthful energy and the melodic expansiveness of Rachmaninov into an ambitious, confident Piano Concerto – played here by a brilliant champion of 20th century women composers, Clare Hammond.

William Walton Sonata for strings

Doreen Carwithen Piano Concerto

Richard Strauss Metamorphosen