Twentieth Century Greats - Bernstein, Strauss, Shostakovich

The Brunel Sinfonia's 2009/10 season ends with three pieces very close to their composers' hearts. Starting with Bernstein's dazzling Candide Overture, which he wrote to start off his opera based on Voltaire's book, the concert then switches mood to the serenity of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

Written only a year before his death, this beautiful work sums up Strauss's lifelong infatuation with the soprano voice. It will be sung tonight by rising star Charlotte Shipley, who has previously sung with the Brunel Sinfonia in works by Britten and Beethoven.

The concert concludes with Shsotakovich's 10th Symphony, reckoned by many good judges to be the best of the fifteen he produced. Supposedly Shostakovich's portrayal of the terrors of Russian life under Stalin, the piece makes its way from darkness, anger and despair to the joyous release of the closing pages in which Shsotakovich's 'DSCH' motto triumphantly assets itself at last.