A Slew of Strauss

Richard Strauss's 150th birthday has spurred a great slew of recordings, some new, some re-released. The trend reaches a particularly profligate level this month, with discs featuring old established interpreters such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Karl Böhm sitting proudly side by side with a new guard of Daniel Harding and Andris Nelsons. There's a lot to be learned from the past, of course, but judging by some of the current releases, performances of Strauss's music are still in really good hands.

To start us off, Praga Digitals offers a recording of four of Strauss's most celebrated works. Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung and Till Eulenspiegel are played by the Vienna Philharmonic under Furtwängler, while Schwarzkopf sings the Four Last Songs with the Philharmonia, the orchestra that premiered these autumnal Lieder with Furtwängler, but performing here with Otto Ackermann. It's a really stylish, not least in the accounts of Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel from 1954. The VPO plays with bright swagger. There's comedy and heart in equal measure, as the orchestra's natural Wienerisch lilt pays wry dividends.

Slightly less persuasive is the 1950 recording of Tod und Verklärung, where matters of intonation and production undermine the narrative. And yet Furtwängler generates significant tension within that opening stasis, offering a rich structural and atmospheric dialectic, made manifest in the sudden release that is felt in the transfiguration, itself mollifying some of the performance's shortcomings.

I had some quibbles too about the performance of the Four Last Songs. But while the orchestra sounds a little fudgy in the opening stretches, Schwarzkopf gives great clarity. She is something of an acquired taste, though her direct approach is certainly akin to the composer's own accounts of his music. If I ultimately prefer an account with more bloom, Schwarzkopf's passive beauty elicits its own truths, not least in 'Beim Schlafengehen', to which she brings eeriness and uncertainty, paralleled in the song and the cycle as a whole's vacillations between major and minor. Click here to order a copy.

Such heritage recordings are also largely the name of the game with Deutsche Grammophon's bumper boxed set of the complete Strauss operas. There are some expected classics here. So we get Georg Solti's brilliantly driven Elektra and his excellent Rosenkavalier, with the peerless Régine Crespin as his Marschallin. There's also Karl Böhm's Capriccio and his Daphne, as well as Clemens Krauss conducting Die Liebe der Danae, as he did at the abortive Salzburg premiere in 1944, cancelled due to the declaration of 'total war'.

Some of the very best of recent recordings are also on offer, such as Sinopoli's fabulously unhinged Salome, with Cheryl Studer as the nympho Princess of Judea and echt Straussian Leonie Rysanek as her all-too-encouraging mother. And, of course, there's Solti's Die Frau ohne Schatten, with Julia Varady, Hildegard Behrens, Plácido Domingo, José van Dam and the Vienna Philharmonic in pretty unbeatable form. As a non-operatic bonus you also get Jessye Norman and the Gewandhausorchester under Kurt Masur offering the very best of Strauss's Lieder, including, for me, the finest account of the Four Last Songs.

Not all of Strauss's operas, however, have been recorded by Decca or DG. So in order to complete this box, they've had to turn to EMI as was, now Warner Classics, for the benchmark Sawallisch Intermezzo with Lucia Popp and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the composer and his wife, while Sony provides a perfectly fine if not outstanding Budapest recording of Strauss's first opera Guntram. Perhaps the real boon of the box, however, given its lack of availability elsewhere, is the 1978 Deutschlandradio recording of the second opera Feuersnot, with Gundula Janowitz, John Shirley-Quick and the DSO Berlin under Eric Leinsdorf.

But I can't help feeling that collections such as this, presented by labels for major anniversaries or birthdays, are ultimately a little short-changing when they can't provide full librettos for the works represented. Most of these, of course, are offered online, as a sop to any critics like me, but rarities such as Die Liebe der Danae, Feuersnot and Guntram have no supporting text, either in the box or on your computer, should you choose to log on. It's a real chink in the collection's armour and a missed opportunity given this anniversary year's opportunity to encourage listeners towards these intriguing and, in the case of Danae, under-celebrated works. Click here to order a copy.

But at least it's not all re-releases this Strauss year. Alongside Deutsche Grammophon's otherwise superb boxed set come two new Universal discs: Daniel Harding's account of Eine Alpensinfonie on Decca – not from the mountains around Garmisch but from the Japanese Alps with the Saito Kinen Orchestra – and Thomas Hampson's Lieder survey on DG, including the 14-minute 'Notturno' from which the disc takes its name. And then there's Andris Nelsons' new collection of tone poems with the CBSO on Orfeo. All three recordings have something to say for themselves.

Hampson, a doyen of Strauss's Arabella in particular, offers a rich and varied collection of songs, featuring typically communicative performances. Dramatic, proto-operatic even, Hampson's interpretations are immediate and often potent. Wolfgang Rieger's gloriously rhapsodic playing sometimes takes too much of the mix than it should and I don't quite know why 'Morgen' does not feature a solo violin, given Daniel Hope's presence in 'Notturno', but this is an enjoyable listen, not least the title track. This setting of an extended poem by fin-de-siècle doyen Richard Dehmel absolutely justifies Hampson's quietly dramatic performance across the disc as a whole. He, Rieger and Hope offer a spacious but taut performance, featuring a particularly rich bass from Hampson, as Hope's eerie solo emerges above. Click here to order a copy.

Night is likewise the springboard for Strauss's Alpensinfonie, beginning in Harding's performance from Japan with thrilling Rheingold-like susurrations. It's all marvellously ominous, brilliantly teeing up the outrageous consequent burst of sunlight. The strings really bed in to 'Der Anstieg' and there's a wonderful tartness to the bucolic themes that pop up here and there in the hiking narrative. Heft in this wildly expansive score largely comes from the lower reaches of the orchestra on this recording and sometimes you're left craving a little more velvet from the strings, but this is a convincing performance, even if Harding doesn't always punctuate the cadences with enough emphasis for my taste. Click here to order a copy.

Andris Nelsons, on the other hand, lives and breathes every moment of the three tone poems he's chosen for his latest Orfeo disc with the Brummies. There's a feral roar to the opening of Also sprach Zarathustra and dangerous swagger to its 'Waltz of the Superman'. Nelsons is a passionate musician and while he can, in his determination, miss as much as he hits, his conviction and attack are never in doubt and the CBSO responds in kind. Don Juan is absolutely thrilling, before the Midlands team round of the disc with a strutting and gloriously silly performance of Till Eulenspiegel, in which the woodwind particularly shines. It may not have the total finesse of the VPO under Furtwängler on the Praga Digitals disc, but in terms of drama and daring, it is its equal. Click here to order a copy.

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