Strauss conducts Strauss. Music & Arts (2 CDs)
Parallel to his career as the often provocative composer of tone poems, operas and songs, Richard Strauss had another career, as a conductor. He was highly enough regarded to have made commercial recordings of Mozart and Beethoven as well as his own music. The radio archive recordings here unearthed by Music & Arts, made with various radio orchestras and the Vienna Philharmonic between 1936 and 1942, cover six works - Eine Alpensinfonie, Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Macbeth and Tod und Verklarung. As in most of his performances, Strauss keeps things on a tight rein, with strong, sinewy lines, favouring speeds that are on the brisk side, and showing remarkable skill in rendering fine detail without any sense of clutter. Strauss was the most phenomenally exciting conductor of his own music.
- Michael Dervan
String Quartets Op 76 Nos 1-3. Lindsay Quartet (ASV)
The six works of his Op. 76 are the string quartets of Haydn's that Irish music-lovers are most likely to encounter in the concert hall. They are among the peaks of 18th-century chamber music and, as Dr Burney remarked, "full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well recently, but of one of highly-cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before". The Lindsay Quartet here plays the first three as if for a listener who is as quick of ear as Dr Burney imagined Haydn to be of invention. That is to say, they approach them with an easy-going, responsive freshness. Hardly a point is missed in performances which frequently marry lightness of touch with depth of insight.
- Michael Dervan
Bartok: Piano Works Vol 6. Zoltan Kocsis (Philips)
Bartok was both a great composer and a great pianist. As a composer he was inclined to the future, as a pianist he was rooted in the past. The Hungarian pianist Zoltan Kocsis has brought a scholarly ear to his fellow countryman's recordings - which he views as texts in their own right - as well as a scholarly eye to the printed editions. This in itself, of course, is no guarantee of anything. But Kocsis is musician enough to have absorbed the results of his researches thoroughly. He plays the by no means commonly-heard music here - the Burlesques, Op. 8c, Sketches, Op. 9b, 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs, Improvisations, Op. 20, 10 Easy Pieces - with always natural-seeming flexibility and freedom. These varied miniatures, 43 tracks in all, have rarely sounded as characterfully persuasive as they do here.
- Michael Dervan
