Halle Choir, Sir Mark Elder

The conflict between spiritual and sensual love has been a recurring theme in art throughout the ages and is central to Wagner's Tannhäuser.

The concert begins with two orchestral pieces from the opera that vividly dramatise the conflict (the Venusberg music being a true orgy of sound!). Richard Strauss's take on the life of the fictional libertine, Don Juan, is both graphically drawn and one of the great orchestral showpieces.

Verdi was more a man of the theatre than the church, though in the last decade of his life he produced his moving Sacred Pieces for choir and orchestra, closing with the Te Deum, his splendid and startling hymn of praise.