Golda Schultz

Golda Schultz is a South African soprano who has built her career in Mozart and Strauss, singing at major opera houses in Europe and the United States. At the Cleveland Orchestra she sings Strauss's Four Last Songs, a work the composer wrote near the end of his life, pairing a soprano's voice with a full orchestra in music that looks back over a career.

Schultz's voice is often described around its clarity and warmth in the upper register, qualities suited to Strauss's Four Last Songs, four settings of poems about aging, memory and the natural world that close with an orchestra imitating birdsong at dusk. Expect long, unhurried phrases, since Strauss wrote vocal lines that unfold slowly over a rich orchestral bed rather than compete with it. The second half of the program turns to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8, written in 1943 during the Second World War, a work of considerable weight and darkness with no vocal part, so Schultz's appearance is confined to the first half.