Were he alive today, Richard Strauss would probably declare these recordings 'fearfully old-fashioned' and suggest we seek out more up-to-date alternatives. In some respects, it would be sound advice. However clean the copies, however good the transfers (and Preiser score well on both counts), the muted, somewhat generalized sound we have on – say – Electrola's 1941 Munich recording of Eine Alpensinfonie is not to be compared with the technically splendid ones of conductors like Kempe in 1971 (EMI, 12/92) and Karajan in 1983 (DG, 6/93), whose performances could also be said to match Strauss's own in their understanding of the work's inner beauty and splendour.
Yet is this, I wondered as I listened to this fascinating survey of 1940s Strauss recordings, exclusively a matter of engineering? The 1941 accounts of Don Quixote and a waltz sequence from Der Rosenkavalier each conveys fairly effortlessly the wit, the humanity – the astuteness – of Strauss's conducting. It is over the bigger, more 'public' works (or, more accurately, their bigger, more public sections) that a veil seems to hang, almost as if Strauss himself doesn't wish us to get too close. The young Carlo Maria Giulini experienced something not unlike this during his time as a viola player in Rome's prestigious Augusteo Orchestra. Having been prepared down to the last demisemiquaver for a performance of Ein Heldenleben by the resident Chief Conductor, the orchestra had the alarming experience of being stopped by Strauss at the end of the opening paragraph: ''Gentlemen, you are playing all the notes. Please, give me an impression of the music''.
A case, possibly of saying: ''Cue Mengelberg'', a Strauss conductor whose 1928 and 1941 Heldenleben recordings (RCA, 11/92 and Teldec, 12/93 respectively) have detail and impressionistic allure in almost equal measure. And yet the 1941 Bavarian Ein Heldenleben is fascinating for the unparalleled feeling of ease, intimacy, and tender passion Strauss is able to bring to the domestic scene. (The virtually silent surfaces here wonderfully complement the ravishing quality of the pianissimo playing he draws from the Bavarian players. )
It is the same with Don Quixote. Such natural wit, such unselfconscious simplicity are hard to come by in rival versions, however dedicated; and performances under conductors like Beecham, Krauss, Reiner, Kempe and Karajan are certainly that.
The recordings in the second set were all made with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1944, the year of an approaching Armageddon and that of Strauss's eightieth birthday. Indeed, all except the Symphonia domestica date from June 1944, the birthday month itself. Strangely, they vary technically – Don Juan (June 12th) is quite well focused, but in Also sprach Zarathustra (June 13th) microphone placement becomes a movable feast, way back for the opening, close in on the great string paragraph that follows. By June 15th, Till Eulenspiegel is all but lost in the spaces of what sounds to me to be an all too obviously empty hall.
The performances of these pieces and Ein Heldenleben (also June 15th) are perfectly good, but also strangely out of sorts. The Vienna Philharmonic plays its collective heart out for the old man. His direction is unswervingly correct. Yet somehow it remains too steadfast, a public man in a public place performing a public duty in a way that is almost aggressively unself-regarding. Ein Heldenleben, in particular, is almost painfully brusque, obviously quicker than the far more gemutlich 1941 Munich performance.
But, then, times had changed. In the coda of the 1944 version of Ein Heldenleben there is a sense, not so much of contented resignation from the world as near-suicidal despair: Strauss the composer of Metamorphosen rather than Strauss the composer of Capriccio. After this glimpse of the skull beneath the skin, the suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme (June 12th) should come as a relief. But Strauss's heart isn't in it. The recording is rough, the playing (initially, at least) scrappy. The wine-and-roses mood this music needs is quite absent. When sentiment breaks through it is either heartbreaking or lugubrious to the point of tragedy. Again, one senses the spirit of the unborn Metamorphosen beating its wings in the air above.
Tod und Verklarung, by contrast, sounds its knell with sweet reasonableness and a dreadful kind of resigned beauty, lovingly realized by Strauss and the orchestra. Its hour come round at last, the work slouches now to its final resting-place. Written by Strauss as the evocation of a dying soul, it evokes here the death throes of an entire culture. Europe is the sick-room, Vienna its elegant antechamber. No other recorded performance has such significance.
By rights, this performance of Tod und Verklarung should end the collection, but Preiser have chosen to do so, inartistically and unchronologically, with a huskily recorded February 1944 account of the Symphonia domestica. It is no fault of the work, or Strauss's conducting of it, that in the circumstances it is the Symphonia domestica that sounds the more meretricious piece. Thus, the whirligig of time brings in his revenge. R1 '9508131'