Strauss: Blake Phillpot

About This Concert

From the charm of Elgar’s Serenade for Strings to the profound emotional weight of Strauss’s Metamorphosen, this programme journeys through some of the most deeply expressive music written for string orchestra. The evening opens with Elgar’s delightful Serenade for Strings, an early work filled with youthful grace, soaring melodies, and the composer's trademark English warmth. The mood then shifts dramatically with J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D minor. Driven by an intense, relentless energy, this masterpiece showcases the keyboard’s fiery virtuosity against a rich, dramatic string backdrop. Following a 20-minute interval, the programme concludes with Richard Strauss’s monumental Metamorphosen. Written for 23 independent string players in the final months of World War II, it is a deeply moving, tragic, and ultimately transcendent elegy for a lost world, and one of the greatest achievements in the string repertoire.