Strauss Death and Transfiguration

Alpesh Chauhan and Benjamin Grosvenor, two outstanding young artists turning heads internationally, make their LSO debuts this evening in core territory by Brahms and Richard Strauss.

Brahms was only 25 himself when he finished his First Piano Concerto, a work which took audiences by surprise with its grandeur and scope, and 40 when he composed the popular Variations on a Theme by Haydn, after which he was completely financially secure. Strauss took ten years to compose the famous tone poems on which his popularity in the concert hall chiefly rest. For Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) he provided a detailed synopsis which the music exactly illustrates of an artist on his deathbed recalling his youth and unfulfilled idealism, before he dies and his soul achieves transfiguration.