With “Aus Italien”, sketched while on a tour of Italy suggested to the young composer by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) began his decisive journey into the musical form that would come to define his orchestral output, the tone poem. In this work, Strauss‘ orchestral mastery is already plainly evident. Honoring the composer’s sesquicentennial, François-Xavier Roth couples this work on his third volume of the complete Strauss tone poems with the monumental “Also sprach Zarathustra” – a work inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophic prose poem.