Fresh from her appearance with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra at the Melbourne Recital Centre on 26 March, Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg heads to the Apple Isle for Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Composed in 1948 with texts by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, the songs are Strauss’s farewell to the world he’d seen burn, including Munich’s National Theatre. It was here that he’d served as Principal Conductor and premiered two of his operas, and he considered its destruction the greatest catastrophe of his life. Eivind Aadland conducts the TSO in a program that also includes Strauss’s Don Juan and works by Ravel.

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Composed towards the end of his long life, the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss sum up life itself. Poignant and profound, they find their ideal interpreter in Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg, who was born in country Victoria and has gone on to conquer the great performance venues of the world. Don Juan comes from early in Strauss’s life. Youthful and energetic, this dazzling showpiece gets the concert off to an electrifying start.

Few works are as ravishing as the Suite No. 2 from Ravel’s ballet score Daphnis et Chloé, while Bolero, with its simple melody repeated over and over, is hypnotic and engrossing as it builds to its monumental climax. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra is complemented by musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music for this, the year’s most explosive orchestral concert.