Daniel Harding conducts “Also sprach Zarathustra”

This concert conducted by Daniel Harding is pervaded with the themes of “light” and “nature”. For example, Richard Strauss begins his Also sprach Zarathustra with the most famous sunrise of musical history, then depicts with extravagant sounds the struggle of the individual against narrow-mindedness and mediocrity. The Korean composer Unsuk Chin, on the other hand, sets the behaviour of light rays to music in her iridescent Rocaná. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s song cycle On Wenlock Edge, with Andrew Staples as soloist, creates vivid tonal images in which the melancholy of the protagonist is reflected by English landscape scenes.