At the opening night of Richard Strauss’ Salome at the Stadtheatre in Graz in 1906, an extraordinary dinner party took place. The world and its music were changing, and the participants of the dinner party – Puccini, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Berg, Mahler, Webern, and Strauss – were at the forefront of music at this volatile time.

In this brilliant performance, Ensemble Q re-creates that dinner party and highlights the sometimes astonishing disparity of works written around that time.

It was the meeting between deep romanticism and atonality, between deep set tradition and breaking of boundaries to allow freedom of artistic expression.