London Philharmonic Orchestra: Damrau sings Strauss

‘The symphony must be like the world’, Gustav Mahler is supposed to have said – but across fin-de-siècle Europe composers found exquisite, teeming worlds of emotion even in the smallest forms, and each of Richard Strauss’s orchestral Lieder is like an operatic scene in miniature.

Few living singers understand Strauss like Diana Damrau – a soprano who, in the words of Gramophone, ‘seems to have the golden touch with everything she sings’. And then Mahler’s Fifth Symphony spans deep despair and ecstatic joy, embracing – along the way – the heart-melting Adagietto, possibly the sweetest love-letter ever written in sound.