The ASO’s themed concerts often explore musical forms through the juxtaposition of contrasting works, and this thought-provoking concert, entitled Skyward, included a classical concerto, a symphonic poem, and a one-movement symphony, combining pure music with programmatic characterisation.

The concert opened with Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Juan Op. 20 of 1888, an early work emerging at the transition from Romanticism to modernism and establishing his musical language. The work concerns the life and death of the legendary Renaissance character Don Juan, and its premiere performance the following year was prefaced with Nikolaus Lenau’s poem Don Juans Ende, telling the tale of Don Juan.

Strauss’s work opens with a powerfully dramatic theme in the horns, which represent Don Juan as he embarks on his journey of romantic exploration, and this horn theme recurs and evolves throughout as Don Juan’s story unfolds. The music proceeds through a series of episodes to depict Don Juan’s romances — a violin passage and a passage for oboe characterise two of Don Juan’s lovers. In the last minute of the work, Don Juan’s increasingly chaotic extraversion suddenly evaporates and the music shifts to a quietly tragic tone, in keeping with his disillusionment and ultimate fate.

Strauss’s composition poses...