Schoenberg's explosive Five Orchestral Pieces are in many ways as revolutionary as Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, exploring troubled inner worlds in music of exquisite, kaleidoscopic colours. Award-winning Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein is the soloist in Scriabin's mystical Prometheus, which depicts nothing less than mankind's quest for enlightenment in music of tremendous power.

After the interval, Debussy seems to prophesy the fallen of the Great War in his oratorio Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, a collaboration with Italian war veteran Gabriele D'Annunzio, which evokes a world of pitiful self-sacrifice, exotic spiritualism and repressed desire.