Search - Strauss, Janowitz, Academy of London :: Songs With Orch / Oboe Cto / Metamorphossen

The many moods and modes of Richard Strauss.

darragh o'donoghue | 05/20/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The nine orchestral songs that open this double-CD will be familiar in mood to anyone who knows that famous final spurt of the Romantic spirit, 'Four Last Songs'. They swoon in the same idiom, rich, melting, melancholic, soaring; heavy, mounting melodies distended like eyelids reluctant to awake. The most beautiful of them - the suspended, quivering 'Morgen' especially - also recall the bleary, passive, decadent, sapped haze of mid-period operas like 'Der Rosenkavelier', which they quote.'Metamorphosen' was written in 1945, specifically in response to the bombing of the Munich Opera House. However its sustained, sombre tone seems to token a whole war and the culture it destroyed, its 23 strings attenuated to the starkest of chamber murmers, sometimes awakening Mahler's ghost.By contrast, the 'Violin Sonata', written when the composer was 20, strives to break the shackles of its form, while the 'Oboe Concerto' might have been penned by Mozart, its glittering classical form fizzing into those orgasmic Straussian melodies.These are fine, clean recordings in which the players, especially in the'Songs', avoid the potential pitfalls of sickliness, making this CD another superb bargain from Virgin Classics."