A sensational moment: The 19-year-old Lili Boulanger wins the prestigious Prix de Rome with her cantata Faust et Hélène, becoming the first-ever female prizewinner. Poetic, sensuous and richly colourful, the describes Faust selling his soul in order to meet the beautiful Helen. In his symphonie dramatique Roméo et Juliette, Hector Berlioz brings one of literature’s greatest love stories to life through shimmering orchestral colours. François-Xavier Roth opens the programme with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen: a work at once sonorous and fragile, in which the composer mourned the devastation of the Second World War.