Richard Strauss

Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. This fourth volume features a veteran of these recordings, the great British bass-baritone Christopher Maltman.

Contrary to a commonly held perception of Strauss as a Lieder composer, what most of the songs in the present volume show is that he was not shy of addressing serious themes. Settings of Rückert, Dehmel, Goethe and others are tinged with a dark regret which is enhanced by their bass tessitura. Strauss the opera composer is evident in the epic scale of the lieder written post-Salome. Roger Vignoles provides his famous extensive booklet notes, with commentary about each individual song and scholarly discourse on the poetry.

Through its unusual exploration of the sumptuous instrumental repertoire of the late Romantic period, late romantic presents an innovative collection of works for flute and piano. Assembled, transcribed and performed by the renowned Portuguese flautist Luis Meireles.

The disc presents an original suite for flute and piano by Charles-Marie Widor, and transcriptions of violin sonatas by Gabriel Pierné and Richard Strauss. Luis Meireles has long felt an affinity with this period of musical expression, and brings dedication and passion in this new and unusual recording, partnered with sensitivity and style by Maria Jose Souza Guedes at the piano. These works are rendered beautifully on a modern wooden flute finely crafted by Anton Braun, which combines the technical capabilities of contemporary instruments with the richness of tone quality presented by the wood. This choice of instrument allows for an illuminating interpretation of such lyrical masterpieces and marks an attempt to recreate the lost qualities of this presently metallic woodwind instrument.

The song recital recorded here brings together five composers of vastly different persuasions. Ives, the inspired maverick, the first composer who captured the "feel" of America in music; Weill, who began life composing important "classical" scores and spent the last ten years of his life writing for movies and Broadway; Rachmaninoff, whose piano concerti and symphonies are known the world over; Strauss, Germany's last all-around genius; and Hugo Wolf, the only one among the five who devoted himself to song, to the exclusion of almost everything else. This recording was made early in Dawn Upshaw’s career after she took the First Prize of the 1985 Walter W. Naumburg Vocal Competition. Since then she has performed all over the world in works from Mozart to Messiaen, on both the opera and concert stage. She has championed contemporary music, giving first performances of over 25 works in the last decade. She has made over 50 recordings and won 4 Grammys.

The Dresden Philharmonic is marking the 75th birthday of its celebrated conductor, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, with the release of a commemorative 5-CD box. Let yourself be carried away by a “faultless philharmonic performance” (Rondo)

The concert which Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic gave in London’s Royal Festival Hall on the evening of Saturday 27 April 1985 was their first in England for four years. In May 1981 they had played Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony in the Royal Festival Hall and given an unforgettable concert of music by Bach, Mozart and Richard Strauss in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre. London had not been included in the orchestra’s itinerary in its centenary year in 1982 and for much of 1983-84 Karajan and the orchestra had barely been on speaking terms. Since the centenary year had been something of a high water mark in this hitherto sensationally successful 27-year partnership, the breakdown in relations came as something of a shock to the musical world. There were times in 1984 when it looked as if the two parties would go their separate ways; finally, a reconciliation was effected in the late summer of that year ahead of a scheduled tour of Japan and South Korea. The Krach was ostensibly over the appointment of a new clarinettist but there were other factors too, not least Karajan’s advancing years and stirrings among a contingent of mainly younger players keen to assert their independence and exploit the financial strength which the orchestra’s sky-high reputation now conferred on them. Throughout his life, Karajan had been noted for his extraordinary mental and physical prowess. Now in his mid-70s, he was troubled by a painful and ultimately irreversible spinal condition that had nearly cost him his life in the winter of 1975-76. He had soldiered on but even his energies were finite. In April 1985, he had invited Klaus Tennstedt to share the conducting burden at the Salzburg Easter Festival. ‘It was good to have Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, happily reunited after a prolonged disagreement, pay their first visit to the Festival Hall – an event said to have caused prices of black market tickets to reach astronomical heights,’ wrote Peter Stadlen in the Daily Telegraph. The audience was clearly shocked to see how frail Karajan had become as he edged towards the rostrum. (He himself likened his experience of walking unaided in his later years to stepping on sheet ice.) The Times reported a slight stumble in the advance, at which point ‘the applause hiccupped in a breathless unison’. Yet once settled on the podium, Karajan was, as ever, fully in control, master of all he surveyed. Extract from the booklet note © Richard Osborne, 2008

Kempe had not conducted the Alpine Symphony before and a Royal Festival Hall performance (in April 1966) preceded the recording which, after prodigious booking efforts to secure the extra number of brass players needed, was made in a very short time (and in normal working hours) at London’s Kingsway Hall. The sessions are particularly well remembered by conductor Elgar Howarth who had recently, and rather reluctantly, become the RPO’s first trumpet (“it meant that I would have to practice!”) – and was immediately faced with “one of the real frighteners in the repertoire, with high, loud and difficult solos, especially that chromatically slippy passage in On the glacier”. However, the only real problem that Howarth recalls in the sessions for the Alpine Symphony was keeping the organ in tune. The horn player Alan Civil (1929-89) was famously cynical about many conductors. On his stand he would keep a complete pocket score of the work he was rehearsing – and was known to make musical points from it to conductors he felt were lacking in talent or detail. Rudolf Kempe, however, was one of the conductors (along with Beecham, Karajan and Klemperer) that Civil especially admired. Indeed, when Kempe moved in 1975 from the RPO to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Civil thought it would be the start of a golden age for the orchestra, an important antidote to the modern, what he sometimes called ‘contemptible’ music which the orchestra regularly programmed in the Glock era. When Kempe died in early 1976 Civil was immensely disappointed. Civil had been one of the two most famous pupils of the legendary Royal Academy of Music horn professor Aubrey Brain, father of the equally legendary Dennis Brain, alongside whom he played in wartime military bands, and the early days of Beecham’s RPO and the Philharmonia. By universal approval, Civil moved up from third horn to inherit Dennis Brain’s principal chair at the Philharmonia’s recording sessions for Strauss’s Capriccio after Brain was tragically killed on 1 September 1957. “I don’t use the word great very often,” says horn player, conductor and professor Michael Thompson, “but Alan Civil was a great horn player.” Excerpt from the note, © Mike Ashman, 2008