Season Finale: An Evening with Richard Strauss
Thursday, August 21, 2025, 6:30 PM MDT
Sun Valley Pavilion
Festival Orchestra
Alasdair Neale, Conductor
Pre-Concert Chat at 5:45 PM
Lawn Paver Bar
Richard Strauss
Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24
Suite from Der Rosenkavalier”
The Summer Season concludes with two pieces from Richard Strauss: his tone poem Death and Transfiguration and the suite from his opera Der Rosenkavalier. Tone poems are compositions that relate to stories in the “real world,” such as a hike in the alps in Eine Alpensinfonie. This one explores mystery of death and what lies beyond. Strauss wrote: “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist.” The Rosenkavalier gives us the finest music from Strauss’s happy, funny, and sentimental opera. Listen for the famous waltz towards the end – a beautiful but also funny bit because waltzes didn’t really exist during the time of the opera’s setting in Mozart’s Vienna. Critics of the day gave Strauss a hard time for that, but we get to enjoy it.