Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/Andris Nelsons & Rudolf Buchbinder

Andris Nelsons conducts one of the world’s most storied orchestras in Part II of his Strauss Project, with the brilliant pianist Rudolf Buchbinder 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. Tonight that role is superbly filled by Rudolf Buchbinder.

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 Nelsons’s Strauss odyssey.