Metamorphoses in music

Each program explores a different aspect of musical transformation. You'll be invited to think about the wider creative and human significance of change. The series includes four concerts, each around 40 minutes long without an intermission, and each begins with a short introduction.

Concert I – Philip Glass: Metamorphosis

Performer: Lavinia Meijer

The opening concert features Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis (1988), a minimalist classic that brings the idea of musical transformation to life through slow, hypnotic changes. Known from Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours (2002), the piece unfolds in five connected movements, where small shifts in rhythm and harmony create a flowing sense of movement and deep emotion.

This performance features a harp transcription by Lavinia Meijer, the Dutch musician known for her close artistic collaboration with Philip Glass.

Date: 1 March 2026
Time: 15.30–16.30h

Concert II – The Metamorphosis of a Flute

Performers: Itai Weissman (EWI), Kate Clark (flute), Sara Brink-Nielsen (harp), Sahand Sahebdivani (storytelling)

This concert centres on a seventeenth-century flute built in Amsterdam and recently donated to the Rijksmuseum. Its sound has been digitally sampled by jazz musician and composer Itai Weissman, allowing the instrument to acquire a renewed identity beyond its fragile material form.

The performance weaves live acoustic and digitally generated music with a spoken narrative delivered by a storyteller, drawing on tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Date: 22 March 2026
Time: 15.30–16.30h

Concert III – Voicing Metamorphoses

Performers: STILE GALANTE – Valeria La Grotta (soprano), Agnieszka Oszanca (cello), Andrea Friggi (harpsichord), Stefano Aresi (artistic director and narrator)

Ovid’s Metamorphoses profoundly shaped the history of opera and vocal music. The stories of Daphne, Eurydice, Orpheus, and others not only provided the foundations for some of the earliest operas ever composed, but also inspired a wide range of vocal works over time.

This programme weaves together vocal pieces and instrumental interludes, tracing the many ways in which Ovid’s myths were translated into music by composers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Date: 12 April 2026
Time: 15.30–16.30h

Concert IV – Richard Strauss: Metamorphosen

Performers: Musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

The final concert of the series features Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), performed in its original version for seven solo strings. Composed in the aftermath of the Second World War, this work 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, as themes slowly evolve, dissolve, and return in altered form.

Date: 17 May 2026
Time: 15.30–16.30h