Two extensive, long-term projects with Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Berlin will continue: the complete performance of Richard Strauss’s orchestral songs and Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems.

The program features songs for tenor and soprano, including the “Three Hymns for High Voice and Large Orchestra” based on texts by Friedrich Hölderlin.

Strauss set the poems to music in the early 1920s with a pronounced sense of cantabile and a particularly richly colored orchestral treatment.

“Les Préludes” is Liszt’s most famous symphonic poem. Its programmatic concept is based on a poem by the French writer Alphonse de Lamartine, which explores the question: What is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown song, whose first and solemn note is struck by death? The “Festklänge” are also opulent in sound yet finely nuanced.

Originally conceived as wedding music, the work premiered in Weimar in 1854 as the overture to a play based on Schiller. This lesser-known composition impressively demonstrates Liszt’s growing mastery in orchestration.