Build not your happiness on the unhappiness of others: That’s the moral of Richard Strauss’s monumental fairytale opera «Die Frau ohne Schatten» («The Woman without a Shadow»), for which the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal also looked to Mozart’s «Zauberflöte» as inspiration. Strauss’s symphonic fantasia brings all the shimmering colours of operatic music into the concert hall as a drama without words. We stay in dramatic territory with Johannes Brahms’s heroic Third Symphony, which culminates in a lyrical apotheosis. Fabien Gabel has also chosen Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 482 as the festive centrepiece of this stirring programme; the prize-winning German pianist Martin Helmchen plays the solo part.