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Donald Macleod charts Richard Strauss’s precocious early years, with music including his First Symphony, which was written in his last year at school.

During Richard Strauss’s lifetime the sound and form of music altered radically. He was born at the tail end of the 19th century and saw the emergence of twelve-tone music and atonality from younger composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Alban Berg. Strauss belonged to a previous generation and his music came to be regarded as conservative in style, but at the start of his career, Strauss had been seen as something of a modernist, breaking the mould with his series of innovative orchestral tone poems, and with the dissonant sound world of operas such as Salome and Elektra.

This week Donald Macleod follows the young Strauss’s pathway leading up to and including the tone poems, seeing how an immersion in music across his formative years influenced his ideas about orchestral writing, as well as opening up opportunities that helped him to establish a professional career as a conductor.

Having written his first compositions aged five, Richard Strauss’s raw musical talent was discovered early on. His progress continued at such a rate that by 11 he was conducting an amateur orchestra, and by 18 he’d written something in the region of 150 works.

Oboe Concerto in D
3rd movt: Allegro (excerpt)
Alexei Ogrintchouk (oboe)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor

Festmarsch in E flat major, op 1
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Neeme Järvi, conductor

Horn Concerto no 2 in E flat major AV 132
III: Rondo (Allegro molto)
David Pyatt, horn
Britten Sinfonia
Nicholas Cleobury, conductor

Symphony no 1 in D minor TrV 94
II: Andante
Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra
Kenneth Schermerhorn, conductor

Concerto for violin in D minor
I: Allegro
Thomas Albertus Irnberger
Israel Philharmonic
Martin Sieghart, conductor

Concert Overture in C minor op 80 TrV125
Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern
Hermann Bäumer, conductor

Producer: Johannah Smith for Â鶹Éç Wales