Lenneke Ruiten & Thom Janssen

In death you will find fulfilment, in your neighbour perhaps the truth behind love. Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder and Benjamin Britten’s Cabaret Songs – posthumous gems by two of the greatest song composers if the twentieth century – sing, each in their own way, about the big questions of life. The melancholy nature of Strauss’s late romanticism is at odds with the wit and charm of Benjamin Britten’s pre-war Cabaret Songs. Based on poems by his good friend W.H. Auden, ‘Tell me the Truth About Love’, ‘Funeral Blues’, ‘Johnny’ and ‘Calypso’ reveal, with their spirited, jazzy undertones, a very different facet of the composer. After unforgettable appearances in Les Huguenots and Bastarda, among others, soprano Lenneke Ruiten will now sing for the first time a recital on the stage of La Monnaie.