Renee Fleming In Concert Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 7, 2012
Salzburg is certainly one of the most charming cities in Europe, especially its core central Old Town area which seems to
be a direct portal back to the Baroque. Buildings seemingly crafted out of gingerbread line narrow streets, façades are
brightly painted and even some costumed shop owners hearken back to a bygone age. The city has become a cultural
touchstone of sorts since 1965, when the film version of
The Sound of Music was released and introduced a
worldwide audience into the scenic splendors of the area, but the title of that film could well be a tagline for a cultural
event that long predates the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and, for Europeans anyway, has come to define the
city much more than even the blockbuster musical film. The Salzburg Festival was founded in 1920 by five titans of
German and/or Austrian art who sought to raise the annual celebration from the ashes of World War I, which had put
the kibosh on what had been occasional performances of music and drama. This quintet included director Max
Reinhardt, poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannstahl, conductor Franz Schalk, set designer Alfred Roller and the man
who is perhaps still best associated with the Festival, legendary composer Richard Strauss. In fact it was at the 1936
Salzburg Festival that the Trapp Family Singers actually performed, setting the stage (no pun intended) for what is the
(fictionalized) climax of
The Sound of Music. Rather surprisingly even with the terror and chaos caused by the
German annexation of Austria, the only World War II era year that the Salzburg Festival didn't go on was 1944 (due to
the then recent plot to assassinate Hitler), and by 1945 the Festival was up and running again, albeit somewhat worse
for the wear. Over the ensuing several years, though, the Festival managed to regain its artistic excellence and cultural
import, and it remains one of the highlights of the European cultural calendar each year, coming to define the halcyon
days of midsummer with exciting performances of chamber and orchestral music, as well as an annual mounting of von
Hofmannsthal's version of
Everyman.
Richard Strauss' compositional legacy is undeniably iconic, and yet the composer himself might be scratching his head
over
the vagaries of fate were he still alive today. Strauss was convinced his relationship with the Nazi regime would make
performances of his work next to impossible in the post-War years, and there's no denying there was a slow (yet
steady)
reestablishment of his reputation in the late forties. But not even Strauss could have foreseen the completely
unexpected
pop cultural phenomenon that was generated by the use of his epic
Also Sprach Zarathustra in Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey, a film which suddenly catapulted Strauss to the top of the pop charts and opened up
his
vast aural vistas to a whole new generation and indeed probably a much wider audience than all the masses that had
heard his work previously up to that point. (Unfortunately the film also had the side effect of linking Strauss with that
other Strauss, Johann II, a linkage Richard himself was adamant not be made and which in its own way led to
Der Rosenkavalier, as if Richard were stating defiantly, "You want
waltzes?
I'll give you
waltzes!")
Strauss takes center stage in this lovely and thrilling 2011 concert from the Salzburg Festival, held in the city's iconic
Grosse Festspielhaus and featuring soprano Renée Fleming with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of the
inimitable Christian Thielemann. With a "cast" like that, it's hard to go wrong, and this is a fantastic overview of just
how wide ranging Strauss' compositional efforts really were. Rather interestingly, four lieder are chosen, but they're
not the composer's legendary
Four Last Songs, the elegiac present the elderly Strauss gifted soprano Maria
Jeritza with shortly before his death and which Jeritza kept a secret until
her death in 1983. Instead Fleming
and Thielemann have chosen earlier works by Strauss, all dating from between 1895-1900. Three of these were initially
written by Strauss for piano and voice, with the composer himself orchestrating two of them,
Befreit, Op. 39 No.
4 and
Winterliebe, Op. 48 No. 5. Robert Heger orchestrated
Traum durch die Dämmerung, Op. 29 No. 1.
The fourth piece,
Gesang der Apollopreisterin, Op. 33 No. 2 was written originally for orchestra and voice.
The compositional and emotional variety on display in these four songs is quite remarkable, but so very typical of
Strauss, who seemed to delight in defying audiences' expectations, especially those of "esteemed" critics who were
constantly thrown for a loop by his refusal to follow accepted tropes.
Befreit is a somewhat morose, melancholy
piece, a sort of deathbed elegy that quite craftily sets a repeated "O joy" in minor tonalities. In complete contrast,
Winterliebe is an ebullient piece of high energy and almost orgasmic melismas which Fleming handles with
relative ease.
Traum durch die Dämmerung isn't especially well served by the Heger orchestration, which,
though certainly competent, doesn't quite have the magic of Strauss' own touch with the orchestra. Speaking of
orgiastic melismas,
Gesang der Apollopriesterin finds Strauss at his most hedonistic, clearly presaging such later
works as the lascivious
Salome in sheer orchestral splendor and libidinous content.
Fleming's mini-concert comes to a close with a brief snippet from Strauss'
Arabella, an aria from the Act I finale
which finds the singer-actress in a particularly coquettish mode. This is some of Strauss' most immediately accessible
operatic music and it brings the vocal side of the evening to an appropriately melodic close.
It's worth noting that even after Fleming's tour of various Strauss endeavors, there is still close to an hour left in this
concert, time given over to one of his strangely lesser performed tone poems,
Eine Alpensinfornie. While this
longest of Strauss' ten tone poems is certainly well known to Strauss aficionados, for some reason this towering (no
pun intended) work hasn't quite matriculated into the public consciousness the way so many other of Strauss' large
scale (again, no pun intended) orchestral offerings have. This is sonic painting of the highest order, obviously highly
influential for any number of later composers, including Ferde Grofé's
Grand Canyon Suite. But Strauss here
was following a programmatic tradition himself, one that traces back at the very least to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.
Strauss paints sound pictures here of the highest (sorry) order, evoking a hike in the Alps which is full of the wonder of
"eternal nature", something perhaps on the composer's mind with the then recent death of Gustav Mahler.
This is musical performance of the highest order, with Thielemann bringing his typically picayune attention to detail and
filling the orchestral side of things with incredible nuance and precision. It's fascinating to watch Thielemann and
Fleming in the soprano's part of the concert: their eye contact is almost palpable, as they seem to be communicating
subliminally with each other, extending phrases ever so slightly with a
tenuto here or a
fermata there,
and giving the music life and energy. Luckily, that very communication is shared with a rapt and adoring audience, and
is so powerful it reaches through the screen to the vicarious audience in home theater land.
