RICHARD STRAUSS 1864-1949

Four Last Songs

 

I           Frühling

II          September

III        Beim Schlafengehen

IV         Im Abendrot

 

RICHARD WAGNER 1813-1883

Tristan und Isolde

Prelude

Mild und leise wie er lächelt (Liebestod – Act III)

Götterdämmerung

Siegfried’s Rhine Journey (Prologue)

Starke Scheite schichtet mir dort... (Act III)

Kirsten Flagstad – soprano

 

Philharmonia Orchestra / Wilhelm Furtwängler

 

In the three month period before this concert, Furtwängler had conducted three complete cycles of Wagner’s Ring at La Scala Milan, with Kirsten Flagstad as the Brünnhilde throughout. Then he had flown to Buenos Aires, where he stayed for a month, conducting ten concerts, including three of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, with the soloists singing in German and the chorus in Spanish. This London concert was the first he gave on his return. He quite often favoured concerts with a large number of shortish items, the kind of thing that is wildly

unfashionable today. Even so, this one seems to be both an exhausting and miscellaneous affair, even if most of it is by Wagner. Unfortunately, the Meistersinger Prelude and the Siegfried Idyll are missing – until very recently it was assumed that the whole concert was, apart from the première of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Who knows what even now may be unearthed?

 

The Strauss songs completed the first half of the programme. The performance (often wrongly alleged to be the dress rehearsal) has long been available on numerous ‘pirate’ labels, in quite dreadful sound. The acetates from which the transfers have been taken in the past were hideously worn, with enormous amounts of swish, groove-wear, crackle and distortion in loud passages. On the present disc the sound is by no means ideal, but it is far superior to anything available previously, and for anyone at all used to listening to historical recordings there will be no problems. Once one knows that there are these shortcomings, the grandeur of the interpretation more than compensates for them. The sound is basically clear, plenty of orchestral detail can be heard, and the warmth of tone that Furtwängler invariably drew from orchestras is immediately apparent. So is the warmth and freshness of Flagstad’s voice, here sounding much more youthful than she did two years later when she recorded the complete Tristan under Furtwängler, and the final scene of Götterdämmerung in one of the spare sessions. Not only fresher, but seemingly more confident that her voice would do everything she asked of it. She takes risks, to thrilling effect. Her breath control is, as

always, miraculous. And in the Strauss songs her firm rhythmic sense means that rapport with the orchestra is virtually flawless. Can a new work ever have been graced with so magnificent an Uraufführung? The constant slight modifications of tempo, the ebb and flow which Wagner had seen as so crucial to the performance of all music, and an unobtrusive feature of Furtwängler’s conducting always, can be heard throughout.

 

Extract from the booklet note Michael Tanner, 2007

 

Testament SBT1410