Strauss: 'Four Last Songs'

Few song cycles have quite so much adoration bestowed upon them as Richard Strauss’s 'Four Last Songs' and it’s easy to see why. Written at the end of his life, their bittersweet rapture has the power to move audiences to tears as Strauss weds poems of nostalgia and goodbye to his genius for opulent orchestral colour. Performed live, they’re an unforgettable experience and we’re delighted to have Elizabeth Llewellyn with us to sing them.

That misty mellowness is echoed in the glories of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, a vision of peace and harmony written at the height of the Second World War. Its dedicatee was Jean Sibelius, whose enigmatic 'Tapiola' – a depiction of Finland’s mythic spirit of the forest – opens the concert.