It used to be that there were only three truly great Alpensinfonien: the composer's, who could not possibly convey the full power with his Nazi-era sound. Dmitri Mitropoulos, who did it stunningly in his all too short European honeymoon after New York, and Rudolf Kempe. Kempe does not send me into ecstacies the way he does many connoisseurs, transparent textures do very little for me if they're an end in themselves... but Kempe just has a natural way about Strauss that works. Karajan? Well, it's literally Alpensinfonie from the POV of the mountain...
There are lots of decent recordings, not too many great ones. It's even screwed up by greats like Jansons, Blomstedt, and Bychkov. Kempe obviously is great in Alpensinfonie. Until recently, the only other truly great recordings were really just Haitink,, Rafael FDB, and maybe Solti. But now....
Well, since 2000, it's been more played than ever before, and oh my, so many greats who've taken up Mitropoulos's challenge. Even Welser-Most, a great Straussian, is magnificent in Munich. And then there are great recordings by youngsters Francois-Xavier Roth, Markus Stenz, Vladimir Jurowski, a great live recording from Fabio Luisi at the Proms, and oldsters like David Zinman in Zurich, Marek Janowski in Pittsburgh, and even Vladimir Ashkenazy has a pretty wonderful performance from Prague, and Ashkenazy can't conduct his way out of a paper bag. Haitink remade it in London to wonderful, Mahlerian effect, and yeah... Thielemann live in Salzburg is pretty great too (grrrrr...).
But there are two that are truly magnificent on a level beyond, and they're exact opposites. One is the Polish conductor, Kazimierz Kord, who conducts just about the quickest performance anybody ever heard. It's how Carlos Kleiber would have done it - full of diaphonous texture and virtuoso bravado. The other is nearly the slowest, by poor Frank Shipway, who was finally getting attention near 80 when he died in a car accident. Shipway should have been the great British romantic of his era - we should have as much of him doing Mahler and Strauss and Bruckner as we have of Charles Mackerras doing Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
Kord has gotten fantastic press, but Shipway's Alpensinfonie got quite a drubbing in some quarters. They don't know what they're talking about. This is real romanticism, in which you follow the writer into the strangest possible places. The passion is there in the extraverted passages, but I'm sure what most critics particularly hated was how much he slowed up in the slow, introverted passages, which contain some of the most suspenseful, refulgent, purely strange pieces of musicmaking in the world, and only Shipway with his extra time gives it their full due. This is music straight out of the 2nd movement of the Pastoral or the third of the Symphonie Fantastique, if you're not risking boredom in the chase for new colors and expressive devices, you're blunting the impact of the piece.
Listen to those glowing overtones in the strings, listen to all those careful balances between the strings and the winds, listen to all those special string slides and wind 'grells', this is what it means to create a uniquely powerful vision of a uniquely powerful work.
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