Nicholas Daniels plays Strauss

Ravel – Pavane pour une infante défunte
Strauss – Oboe Concerto, TrV 292
Strauss – Metamorphosen
Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin

Michael Seal – conductor
Nicholas Daniel – oboe

We welcome the City of Birmingham’s associate conductor, Michael Seal – “one of the CBSO’s best-kept secrets” – to direct a concert that illustrates the differing ways two twentieth-century composers approached and portrayed death. As depressing as this may sound, it makes for some of the most glorious music ever written – Ravel’s beautiful “evocation of a pavane that a little princess [infanta] might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court” being a perfect example. Richard Strauss’ heart-rending Metamorphosen for twenty-three strings – an elegy for the destruction of culture, written at the end of both the Second World War and the composer’s life (as was the Oboe Concerto) – though, will be hard to surpass.