“Imagine a hundred elite athletes racing to a cliff edge and leaping over, not to their doom but to exhilarating flight. The opening of Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Op 20, should sound like that, and unless disaster strikes in this most fiendish of works, usually does. In the hands of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and its chief conductor, Andris Nelsons, the eruption of energy was on a different scale, adrenaline palpable, impact electrifying. The floor vibrated, a novelty in the unyielding acoustic of the Barbican.”