Richard Strauss loved the soprano voice above all others. For 25 minutes of his music for soprano and full orchestra at its most sublime—minus the hysterics, abstruse mythologies, and Viennese sugar highs of the operas—the Four Last Songs is totally the ticket. The legendary Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad, never previously associated with Strauss’s music, sang the premiere at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1950, with Wilhelm Furtwängler at the helm of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Given transparent timbre, poised phrasing, and an unaffected poetic sensibility, these luminous end-of-life meditations will blossom in lighter voices, too. Asmik Grigorian has made her name over the past decade as the most electrifying stage animal roaming the operatic zoo, yet she also possesses a stillness that sets a concert stage aglow. Note that while most soloists regard the Four Last Songs as a full evening’s work, Grigorian returns at the end of the program in the finale of Suor Angelica as Puccini’s unwed mother shunted off to a convent to protect the family name. Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, the program opens with Haydn’s highly charged Symphony No. 52 in C minor, one of the composer’s so-called “Sturm und Drang” group; his biographer H. C. Robbins Landon called No. 52 “the grandfather of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” for its “mathematical precision” and “extreme conciseness.” And to raise the curtain on Suor Angelica, Welser-Möst has chosen a suite from Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, an opera in which hope and despair can be hard to disentangle. —Matthew Gurewitsch