‘And the soul, unguarded, yearns to fly free…’ At the end of a long life, Richard Strauss gazed calmly into the sunset.

No composer has ever left a more poignant final word than Strauss in his Four Last Songs – or bade farewell with such ravishing beauty. They’re the only possible way for John Mauceri and soprano Angel Blue to end a whole concert of music that strives for transcendence, from Schoenberg’s exquisite homage to Bach and Hindemith’s musical vision of the miracles of St Francis, to the radiant climax of Wagner’s Parsifal. Music to take you to another world: as Wagner himself put it, ‘here time becomes space’.