★★★★★
ast year's anniversary was marked on disc with a plethora of reissues but comparatively little new work, so this version of , though released late, is more than welcome. Taped live at the Frankfurt Opera in 2013, it's an insightful, if uneven affair. The recording's provenance is very apparent in moments of wayward voice/orchestra balance, stage clatter and audience intrusion...
- www.theguardian.com
2015-02-12
★★★★★
hough Strauss has never featured prominently in 's conducting career, either in the concert hall or opera house, he has recorded Ein Heldenleben before, in the early 1990s for Erato, to launch a series devoted to Strauss's symphonic poems with the Chicago Symphony. Returning to it now with the Berlin Staatskapelle, which Strauss himself conducted at the turn of the 20th century, his performance revels in the colours that this fabulous orchestra draws from the score...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-12-19
★★★★★
ilmed at last year's , and released to mark the 150th anniversary of 's birth, this beautiful, if troubling DVD also forms an unofficial tribute to the production's director, , who died three months after its premiere. He will probably be best remembered for his 1976 , which overhauled the parameters of Wagnerian stagecraft, and for his 1994 film , with its uncompromising reconstruction of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-12-12
★★★★★
Mezzo Brigitte Fassbaender features in a series of speaking parts as the Storchs' put-upon servants. Photograph: Frank Leonhardt/Alamy The German CPO label has distinguished itself during the Strauss anniversary, first with its new recording of Josephslegende, and now with this fine performance of Intermezzo, the composer's autobiographical 1924 opera, depicting a period of strain in his own marriage...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-10-10
★★★★★
Considerable achievement by conductor Stefan Solyom. Photograph: Tony Briggs Premiered in Paris in May, Josephslegende was Richard Strauss's first completed ballet score. Its history was vexed, and there is still considerable disagreement as to its qualities and worth...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-09-11
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDRichard StraussStrauss: Elektra (Vienna State Opera/Bohm, 1965) Live recordingKarl BöhmOrfeo2014 Conducted by Karl Böhm, this derives from a radio broadcast from the Vienna State Opera in 1965. It features one of the most striking casts ever assembled for the work, though some of the individual singers can be heard to better advantage elsewhere...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-08-08
★★★★★
The Strauss performing tradition runs deeper in Dresden than anywhere else. Nine of the composer's operas received their premieres there, including Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella. At the start of this 150th-birthday year, Christian Thielemann, and later in January he conducted the same cast in a concert performance at the Berlin Philharmonie, which forms the basis of these discs...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-08-01
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDR StraussR. Strauss: Wind SonatinasNoneBerlin Classics2014 Richard Strauss's two Sonatinas for an ensemble of 16 wind instruments are late works, part of the so-called Indian summer of his composing career that followed the completion of his final opera Capriccio, and which also produced the Oboe Concerto, Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-07-18
★★★★★
'Textural clarity and drama' ... Andris Nelsons. Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images Don Juan was the work that Andris Nelsons chose as his calling card in 2008 when he was first presented as the CBSO's next music director, and Richard Strauss's music has been a staple of his Birmingham programmes throughout his tenure. This is the third disc of the symphonic poems that he and the orchestra have made for Orfeo...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-05-30
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