Slovak Sinfonietta Zilina

The year 1847 witnessed a rich variety of scores from Johann Strauss (the Elder). In May he wrote The Swallows, sparkling avian waltzes, soon after which he unveiled his dramatic Austrian March-Past to great acclaim. His quadrille on themes from Auber’s opera The Devil’s Due is an ingenious composition, whilst The Meadow Flowers drew from him fragrant lyricism in the Ländler style. As the New Year dawned he revealed the luscious Dance-Signals, a waltz fit for the Carnival season.

Memorials, Name Days, and aristocratic connections were just some of the many incentives for Johann Strauss the Elder to pour forth his unrivalled series of waltzes, quadrilles and polkas for his ravenous Viennese public. During 1846-47 such opportunities included a work to honour the celebrated singer Jenny Lind (Swedish Songs), whilst New Year provided a supreme example of his festive skill. Nor did he ignore the professions: lawyers and doctors received dedicatory waltzes, and so did a couple of much beloved comic book characters.

Despite charitable funds raised by the Fortune and Viennese Kreutzer polkas, revolutionary Habsburg insurgencies became a dangerous fact of life in the Vienna of 1848. Strauss (the Elder) demonstrated solidarity through his Austrian National Guard March, lampooning the old order with his March of the Legion of Students. Heard on this recording in its original, more transparent orchestration, and without the drumroll, the irrepressibly festive Radetzky March celebrated military victory in Italy and became his most famous work. Viennese citizens filled the carnival season ballrooms, and the escapist Stress Relievers waltzes, which conclude this recording, roused frenzied cheering.

Johann Strauss the Elder’s compositions of the mid-1840s are among his very finest. As ever they are saturated with his seemingly inexhaustible vitality and invention, qualities admired by dancers and critics alike. The Austrian Celebration March was written, in dashing military fashion, for the unveiling of a monument to Emperor Franz I. In Bohemian Girl Quadrille, Strauss uses themes from the Irish composer Michael William Balfe’s then wildly popular opera The Bohemian Girl to such dizzying effect that it was encored three times. Sounds of the Vltava, written following the devastating flood in the spring of 1845, was a gift to the citizens of Prague.

With their melodic richness, sparkling instrumentation, originality of invention and irresistible momentum, Johann Strauss the Elder’s compositions of 1845-46 are among his most memorable. His waltzes and quadrilles were heard in some of the grandest Viennese ballrooms (one with 6,000 candles) and excited admiration from dancers and critics alike.

Robert Schumann said of the Concordia Dances that they were “real foot-waltzes, to which everything surges and jumps”. Whether writing for benefit concerts for victims of the “Saxon Flood” – Merry Pictures of Life was received with “hurricane-like applause” – or basing his themes on Flotow’s opera Alessandro Stradella, Strauss possessed such an inexhaustible and unrivalled mastery of the waltz that each new work was greeted by his adoring public as his best.

Despite a contemporary critic’s declaration that ‘the waltz is the dance of love and it contains within it more poetry than all the other national dances of the world!’, Johann Strauss I happily penned other dances such as the quadrilles and polka heard here.

Nonetheless, captivating waltzes composed for Viennese open-air galas, fairs, festive balls, carnivals and other celebrations comprise the bulk of music on Volume 18 of Marco Polo’s popular edition of the elder Strauss’s evergreen music.

‘Visions of the great dance halls of old Vienna filled with happy dancers hearing these pieces for the first time will dominate your thoughts’ American Record Guide.

This seventeenth volume in Marco Polo’s popular Johann Strauss I Edition celebrates the internationally adulated Viennese composer’s unflagging ability to create dance music for all occasions and to stimulate a public avid for ever-new entertainment.

His quadrilles, polkas, waltzes and other dances, usually named for the events at which they were first heard, today conjure visions of a vanished world of fashionable balls and spectacular events, such as the Emperor Ferdinand I’s name-day in 1884 for which the Festive Quadrille was composed or the 1847 Spring Festival at which Aurora’s Festive Sounds was played to a crowd of 30,000.

This sixteenth volume in Marco Polo’s ongoing Johann Strauss I Edition includes dances that reflect topical events, obsessions and the ever ubiquitous cult of the personality.

The set of waltzes with the title Die Dämonen (The Demons) was received with tumultuous applause on the occasion of the ‘extraordinary festival evening’ in the Sperl ballroom on 23rd November 1842.

Strauss’s regular involvement in celebrations to honour the ruling Emperor and Empress can be heard in the two quadrilles written to celebrate their name-days.

First heard during a a charity concert for one of Vienna’s children’s hospitals, the Loreley-Rhein-Klänge (Lorelei-Rhine-Sounds) waltzes quickly established themselves as Strauss’s undisputed showstopper, not surpassed until his Radetzky March written half a decade later.

In a career that spanned a period from the 1820s until his death in 1849, the older Johann Strauss established an unrivalled position for himself among composers and performers of dance music in Vienna.

This fifteenth volume in Marco Polo’s ongoing Johann Strauss I Edition presents a cavalcade of dances including the rapturously received High Society Quadrille, the uplifting Strollers Waltzes, the highly original Valhalla-Toasts Waltzes and the Minnesinger Waltzes, which borrow from the music of Adrien-François Servais, ‘the darling and hero of the 1842 concert season’.