"Echoes of the Past"

Paul Hindemith’s Symphonie Mathis der Maler is a riveting musical portrait of the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, who ultimately abandoned his art to devote himself to his people’s political and military struggle for freedom. Ottorino Respighi’s brilliantly crafted four-movement tone poem, The Pines of Rome, paints a vivid musical picture of four settings around the perimeter of the Eternal City: the gardens of the Villa Borghese, the ancient Catacombs, the Janiculum hill, and the grandiose Appian Way.