Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling is a singer who unfailingly brings every word magically to life, together with her longstanding duo partner Paul Rivinius, and we are thrilled to have them return to the Festival. The centrepiece of tonight’s programme is Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, which sets the poetry of Friedrich Rückert. Rückert wrote these heart-wrenching poems after the death of two of his children. Mahler composed three of the four songs in the summer of 1901 after a near-death experience of his own, and the fourth in 1904. Following the death of his daughter three years later, Mahler wrote that, when composing the songs, ‘I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more.’ In spite of their harrowing subject, these are some of Mahler’s most beautifully crafted songs. For the rest of the programme, Camilla turns to her compatriots, with works by Gunnar de Frumerie and Emil Sjögren, both prolific composers in the great Romantic tradition of Swedish song.