“I only conduct pieces that I think I have something to say with,” says Donald Runnicles. As part of our online festival Die Goldenen Zwanziger (The Golden Twenties), the general music director of Deutsche Oper Berlin presents three works from operas written in the 1920s whose music reflects the disparate attitudes to life of the time: Schreker’s Schatzgräber, Berg’s Wozzeck and Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny confront us with the dark depths of society and the human soul. The concert opens with the pastoral, languorous prelude to d’Albert’s opera Tiefland, a tale of jealousy set among Spanish farmers in the Pyrenees, which premiered in 1903.