Richard Strauss Four Last Songs form a coda to the composer's career, who was over eighty when he wrote them, and selected texts of falling leaves, crepuscular vibe and mournful elegy. They're however a fitting start for the upcoming South African soprano Elza van den Heever, who heartrendingly sang them last night with MTT and the San Francisco Symphony. VDH made her first splash when, as an Adler fellow and the understudy for Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, the SF Opera dumped the originally planned soprano to give her the role. She kicked ass. And she did again last night.

She is a statuesque, so tall that MTT had to stay on his podium to hug her his congratulations, and she has the big voice to match. Yet, she delivered a very controlled flow, crafted out of pianissimos and soft textures. She let out her power only in Frühling and in a hair-rising moment in Beim Schlafengehen. There the vocal lines repeats a rising violin melody, where peace breaks out of sadness ("and the soul unguarded will soar in free flight"). To paraphrase Hesse, whose lines (and those of von Eichendorff) were borrowed for these songs, Elza's voice soared in free flight indeed and in last night's magic circle, lived deeply in a thousand different ways. One nitpicky nitpick: the German diction sounded a bit forced ("zu" came out as "tssssssu"). But who cares.