ConcertPulse
SZ charity concert with Daniel Harding
This all-Strauss programme spans the composer’s entire life, from the intoxicating vitality of Don Juan, composed at the age of 24, to the melancholy retrospection and farewell that he transmuted into beauty in the Four Last Songs in 1948, a year before his death. The third piece on the programme, Thus Spake Zarathustra, is perhaps the most ambitious of Strauss’s tone-poems: the clash of two disparate tonalities (C major and B major) and the juxtaposition of rigorous musical forms and philosophically-tinged intertitles lend a spellbinding force to this Nietzschean homage. Even without specific references to the historical Zarathustra, Nietzsche and Strauss did much to make Zoroastrianism better known in Europe.