„Hörst du nicht die Bäume rauschen?“ (‚Can’t you hear the trees rustling?’) This line from the "Six Garden Songs" from Fanny Hensel provides the motto for the MonteverdiChor München’s concert programme of a-cappella works from different eras. Composers of the late Renaissance such as Maddalena Casulana, an acclaimed northern Italian lutist and singer, and Claudio Monteverdi took inspirations from poetic descriptions of nature, similarly to Romanticists such as Johannes Brahms, Edward Elgar and Amy Beach. Whilst their means to express portrayals of nature as a mirror of human emotions is very familiar to the audience, Hugo Distler challenges these traditional practices in his Mörike Song Book from 1939. In his "Five Flower Songs" in 1950 Benjamin Britten finds a place for the plainest and most non-descript plants in his music when he takes up poems from the baroque and romanticist eras. The intimate musical Rilke version by Lucian Beschiu from 2015 draws the arch to the present.
