"Chief conductor Mariss Jansons is dedicating this programme to fate. At the age of twenty-five, Strauss wrote Tod und Verklärung, a symphonic poem about a sick man fighting death, who sees his life pass before him and finally finds peace.

Before starting work on his Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky was suffering from ‘writer’s block’. Yet he did eventually manage to get the work down on paper fairly quickly. Like Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s centres on the transition from minor to major – from darkness to light. He wrote in his diary that the work is about man’s struggle against fate."