Wagner, Strauss and Tchaikovsky: Last Songs

The Philharmonia’s 80th birthday celebrations continue with a concert showcasing the huge range of emotions an orchestra can express in sound. 

Composed when he was 84, Richard Strauss’s serene Four Last Songs speak of gratitude for a life well lived, the riches of creation, and the joy of human love. Strauss, who conducted the Philharmonia himself in its early days, wrote to soprano Kirsten Flagstad that the piece ‘should be at your disposal for a world premiere… with a first-class conductor and orchestra’. And it was with the Philharmonia that she gave that first performance in 1950.  

Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha follows in these illustrious footsteps. ‘The South African has a sumptuous, plush sound… Hear [her] live and it’s as if you’ve died and (sins allowing) gone straight to Heaven.’ (The Times).  

Wagner evokes a much stormier kind of love in his Prelude and Liebestod. These two orchestral passages from his opera Tristan and Isolde are a musical embodiment of intense and passionate longing – the medieval lovers of the opera’s title can be united only in death.  

Tchaikovsky’s final symphony crowns this evening’s programme. At the height of his compositional powers, Tchaikovsky overturned many of the conventions of the symphony. The second movement, which at first sounds like a graceful waltz, in fact has an unsettling five beats in a bar; the third reaches its climax with a blaze of brass and percussion which would have made the perfect triumphant finale; but the actual finale ends with a devastating descent into silence.