*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

STRAUSS: FOUR LAST SONGS DIE

Classical Music

EIN HELDENLEBEN & TOD UND VERK

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

DON QUIXOTE

This is a DSD (Direct Stream Digital) recording

DIE FLEDERMAUS

TILL EULENSPIEGEL HELDENLEBEN

STRAUSS: SALOME MEHTA, MARTON

This is juicy. I’m sure that many music lovers have wished that Strauss had made a suite from Elektra. It is, after all, one of his most exciting scores, as well as one of his most symphonically cogent. Well, here it is, courtesy of Manfred Honeck and Tomas Ille, and it’s a doozy. You get all of the major bits: Elektra’s opening monologue, the entry of Klytaemnestra, the recognition scene, the two murders, and of course the final dance of death. It lasts 33 minutes, or a bit more than a quarter of the entire opera, which makes it the same length as Also sprach Zarathustra or one of the larger tone poems.

The piece is remarkably cogent. It plays continuously, and Honeck/Ille felt no obligation to stick slavishly to the order of events in the opera. Rather, they have contrived an effective sequence of violent and more lyrical episodes, with remarkably seamless transitions. The entrance of Klytaemnestra, for example, does not spill over into her actual opening lines (sound clip). Strauss’ original works well in the theater where the change of focus from the orchestra to the singer explains the sudden break in texture; here, however, the music flows on without a break. Honeck explains that he has also reduced the orchestra slightly to make the suite more playable by normal-sized orchestras, but you’d hardly know it. There is absolutely no reason why this arrangement should not become a repertory item forthwith–only it would be hard to imagine a performance played more brilliantly than this one.

The Rosenkavalier Suite is the standard one, by Artur Rodzinsky, and it too sounds glorious on this smashingly recorded disc. Coupling the two works makes great sense: you get Strauss at his most expressionistic, and then Strauss in all of his schmaltzy, neoclassical splendor. Although the sound and style are quite different between the two works, Strauss’ fingerprints are always in evidence. I don’t need to say anything more: if a disc like this is not self-recommending, then I don’t know what is.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

"•Christiane Karg feels close to Richard Strauss, and not simply because they both grew up amid Bavarian landscape. Together with Mozart, the great late Romanticist now plays an ever greater part in her repertoire: she was recently acclaimed in both Antwerp and Ghent as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. Since Strauss has always figured in her lieder recitals, this CD of Strauss lieder comes as no surprise, especially in view of the forthcoming anniversary year, marking the composer's 150th birthday. Indeed, anyone who has followed Christiane Karg's career will see this new release as a logical consequence. You only have to listen to the timbres in her voice and the skill with which she lends them an artistic and natural touch, and you will hardly be able to avoid comparisons with the great voices of her fach. • Christiane Karg's personal choice of lieder combines the familiar with the seldom-heard, lively songs with more reflective ones, and delivers a convincing range that rightly demotes such details to a secondary role. She succeeds in demonstrating as has seldom been achieved the touching manner in which Strauss's early and mature lyricism is able to transform the great themes of love and transience that were woven into his expression of the Romantic world around him. One especially charming example is the song ""Alphorn"" written when the composer was a mere twelve years old, requiring an obbligato horn, played on this recording by Felix Klieser. Her pianist is Malcolm Martineau, an exceptional artist in his own right, who navigates virtuoso hurdles with ease while giving the vocal part a steady foundation. One only needs to hear the opening bars of ""Morgen"" in order to capture that remarkable musical pulse. – This is a real summit of achievement!"

“Workshop works, to keep the right hand, freed from the baton, from dozing off too soon” is how Richard Strauss understatedly described his masterly output following his final 1942 opera “Capriccio”, including his two Sonatinas for 16 winds. Members of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra founded the armonia Bläserensemble in 2000. The ensemble’s repertoire ranges from Trio d’Anches and classical wind quintets to Mozart, Dvorák and Richard Strauss.

Theo Adam in Opernszenen von Richard Wagner

In mid-1941 Toscanini temporarily fell out with the NBC Symphony Orchestra management, and during the following season directed the Philadelphia Orchestra in a number of concerts. Some of the items he conducted were also recorded by RCA over several sessions, but various technical disasters left the metal masters with heavy surface noise and a barrage of clicks and pops. Nothing could be done to salvage the situation at the time, but later technology opened up possibilities and in 1963 the Schubert Ninth Symphony was published. In 1977 the whole Philadelphia series finally saw the light of day on five LPs (nla), but some allowance had then to be made for the recording quality. Further technological miracles have taken place and as a result all the performances have emerged on CD with remarkably improved sound. In fact, the recordings now seem very good indeed for their date, and RCA are therefore in a sense justified in leaving the troubled history of the enterprise out of their accompanying notes.

...Toscanini re-recorded all the Philadelphia items with the NBC orchestra, but later versions do not all show gain... [A] great performance whose qualities really emerge for the first time in the improved sound is that of the Pathetique. Here is a most moving, eloquent and exciting account of the symphony, one which is a great deal more characterful than Toscanini's somewhat detached 1947 NBC recording. This now takes its place besides the extraordinary 1937 Furtwängler version as one of the most powerful accounts of the work ever recorded... Strauss's Tod und Verklärung is given a very dramatic, vivid reading...

The Philadelphia Orchestra of 1941 was very much a Stokowski-trained instrument, and possessed more tonal colour and warmth than the New York, NBC and BBC orchestras with which Toscanini made most of his recordings. These performances tend to show a different aspect of the great conductor, one where he sometimes responds in a slightly more yielding fashion to the character of the orchestra and to the acoustic of Philadelphia's Academy of Music, which was softer than Toscanini's usual New York venues.

-- Gramophone [6/1991]