Metamorphoses in the Rijksmuseum

Taking Ovid’s classic work of the same name as its guiding principle, ‘Metamorphoses’ – in collaboration with the Galleria Borghese in Rome – brings together over eighty masterpieces from museums and collections around the world, ranging from Bernini, Titian, Correggio and Caravaggio to Rodin, Brancusi, Magritte, and Bourgeois. To accompany the exhibition, the Rijksmuseum presents a series of four concerts. During the final concert on 17 May, musicians from the Concertgebouw Orchestra will perform Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid and Richard Strauss’s moving Metamorphosen in Rudolf Leopold’s version for seven string players.

Strauss composed Metamorphosen in the aftermath of the Second World War. The work (originally for 23 string players) is a meditation on destruction, memory and rebirth – a lament for the devastation of German culture, and for humanity itself. In Strauss’s deeply personal score, musical transformation becomes a metaphor for mourning and renewal: themes slowly change shape, dissolve and return in a new form. Britten’s Six Metamorphoses (1951) are six miniatures for solo oboe based on characters from Ovid’s epic poem: Pan, Phaeton (the son of Apollo who came too close to the sun), Niobe, Bacchus, Narcissus, and Arethusa.