Strauss Ein Heldenleben

François-Xavier Roth conducts the second of two concerts exploring the legacy of Romanticism through Webern, Berg and Strauss.

An early piece from Webern opens this concert: Im Sommerwind, a student work that demonstrates the young composer’s devotion to all that is lush and Romantic wrapped around an ode to nature from Bruno Wille. A fitting opener to prepare the way for Ein Heldenleben, Strauss’s musical epic that tells a hero’s life in six episodes of gigantic orchestral writing, with all the peaks and troughs of his triumphs and defeats given the musical drama that only this great orchestrator can conjure. These two works sit either side of Berg’s Violin Concerto, a virtuosic tribute to the premature death of a friend’s daughter.

François-Xavier Roth on his ideas behind the After Romanticism series