Gewandhausorchesterj Leipzig – Andris Nelsons & Yuja Wang – The Strauss Project Part II

Andris Nelsons conducts one of the world’s most storied orchestras in Part II of his Strauss Project, with the brilliant pianist Yuja Wang providing an extra sprinkling of star power. Nelsons launches Part II of The Strauss Project with the work that launched Strauss’s career, Don Juan. Witness salacious seductions and deadly duels in his musical portrait of the notorious libertine, before enjoying a humorous homage to his early musical idol, Johannes Brahms. Burleske demands the fiendish technical virtuosity of Liszt, defies convention, and cries out for a pianist to match – and we don’t think there’s a better fit than the sensational Yuja Wang. A mouth-watering programme is completed by a piece with ‘an unfathomable beauty so awe-inspiring that it terrifies with the same intensity it beguiles’ (Gramophone). Immortalised in pop culture by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Also Sprach Zarathustra opens with a sunrise to end all sunrises and sees the sun set on the Barbican half of Nelsons’s Strauss odyssey.