Exiles and elegies

Vladimir Jurowski has always looked at 20th-century music in a very personal way – and in his penultimate concert as Principal Conductor of the LPO he returns, with love, to two composers who followed their own paths in dark times. For Vladimir, Rachmaninoff’s music is all about ‘human emotions, human life, human suffering, human joys’ – and tonight he champions the exiled composer’s bittersweet, neglected Third Symphony. First, though, comes Richard Strauss. The LPO’s strings play the devastating wordless war requiem Metamorphosen, and Miah Persson sings the Four Last Songs: sorrow transmuted into pure, radiant beauty.