Scottish Chamber Orchestra

This programme unites two late Romantic masters, Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss. In some respects polar opposites – Bruckner obsessed by the spiritual, Strauss a man of the world – both build nonetheless on Wagner’s heritage. Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, the ‘Romantic’, foregrounds the other-worldliness in Wagner, with its magical horncalls and shimmering evocations of the German forest.

By the time of the Oboe Concerto, written for an American soldier who door-stepped Strauss in 1945, Wagner’s grandiloquence had long since been abandoned; however, traces of his distinctive harmonies remain, melded – as so often in late Strauss – with pure Mozartian melody.