Four Last Songs

In 1948, Richard Strauss sensed the end was nigh. Germany lay in ruins, its major opera houses destroyed by war. As his attempts to ignite a cultural rebirth in his homeland proved futile, Strauss turned to music. His final goodbye was a series of four iconic orchestral songs that, in the words of David Bowie, ‘ache with love for a life quietly fading.’ Lucy Crowe joins the Orchestra for a performance of Strauss’s profoundly moving musical epitaph alongside the Orchestra’s Solo Oboe Gordon Hunt performing Strauss’s tender Oboe Concerto written just a few years earlier.