ORFEO International – Reviews

Important Releases Briefly Introduced

May 2007

Salzburger Festspieldokumente 2006

I Hear America SingingFor fifteen years our Festspieldokumente series has featured live recordings of highlights from eight decades of Salzburg Festival performances preserved in the archives of Austrian Radio. This summer’s releases – like the 2006 festival as a whole – are dominated by Mozart, though by no means exclusively so. We start with three song recitals, first of which is a compilation of Mozart lieder taken from performances given between 1958 and 1984 by Irmgard Seefried, Ingeborg Hallstein, Helen Donath, Edith Mathis, Edita Gruberová, Peter Schreier and Walter Berry and offering listeners substantial musical pleasures and an opportunity to draw some fascinating comparisons between different interpretations of the same songs (C 709 062 I). Next come two cycles planned and presented by Thomas Hampson: I Hear America Singing (C 707 062 I) and Verboten und verbannt (C 708 061 B). Dating from 2001 and 2005 respectively, these releases document two important projects featuring a wide range of late Romantic and early modern works, some of which were prevented from reaching a wider audience for ideological reasons but which are now denied any greater exposure by the unimaginativeness of programme planners.

Conversely, it has taken almost half a century for one particular opera performance to appear on CD, a performance which, like Thomas Hampson’s recital of American songs, reflects the earlier dialogue between European music and its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic. But the prayers of opera fans have now been answered with the release of
Samuel Barber: VanessaSamuel Barber’s first opera, Vanessa, which received its European première at the 1958 Salzburg Festival with an illustrious cast that included three of the singers who had taken part in the New York première, Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias and Nicolai Gedda. They were joined by the luxurious-sounding Vienna Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos (C 653 062 I), providing an interesting counterpoint to this year’s “Mozart 22” project featuring productions of all of Mozart’s operas to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth in Salzburg. His first opera seria, Mitridate, re di Ponto, has found an increasingly appreciative audience in recent years. At the Mozart Week performance in 1997, Bruce Ford, Cyndia Sieden, Christiane Oelze and Vesselina Kasarova provided a homogeneous and stylish ensemble, with the Salzburg Camerata under the direction of Sir Roger Norrington, whose interpretation is in every way a reading for its time (C 703 062 I). The variety of approaches to Mozart throughout the course of the festival’s history emerges to striking effect from a compilation of four very different interpretations of the
Violin Concerto in A major K 219 recorded between 1956 and 1973 (C 713 062 I). Experts and amateurs alike will enjoy comparing these performances: Arthur Grumiaux with the Mozarteum Orchestra under Bernhard Paumgartner offers a reading that is both elegant and wholly unassuming, while that of Erica Morini with the Orchestre National de la RTF under George Szell comes close to the ideal of a musical dialogue. Aided and abetted by the Dresden Staatskapelle under Karl Böhm, Nathan Milstein is impulsive and tempestuous. And, last but not least, Wolfgang Schneiderhan is first among equals with the Vienna Philharmonic. Three great Mozart sopranos may be heard on a single CD, not – it is true – in a direct comparison – but at least in a form that sets off their varied gifts: the young Ileana Cotrubas is heard in Mozart’s early pastoral singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne, while Edita Gruberová and Krisztina Laki are showcased as the rival sopranos in Der Schauspieldirektor, their vocal excellence fully brought out by Leopold Hager’s solicitous conducting of the Mozarteum Orchestra (C 705 061 B).

The third of our three digiboxes – the other two are the afore-mentioned set of Mozart lieder and the four different interpretations of the A major Violin Concerto – also offers listeners an entertaining chance to compare different readings.
C 712 062 I features piano sonatas by Mozart played by seven legendary pianists: Claudio Arrau, Glenn Gould, Shura Cherkassky, Wilhelm Backhaus, Emil Gilels, Sir Clifford Curzon and, finally, Clara Haskil, whose only solo recital at the Salzburg Festival, dating from 1957, is available in its entirety on another of Orfeo’s new releases, C 706 061 B.

Hans Knappertsbusch had not only had a particular affinity with the music dramas of Wagner but was no less responsive to two composers who could hardly have been more different from Wagner in the nineteenth-century concert hall: Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner. For decades Knappertsbusch pursued this love on the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic, both in the Musikverein in Vienna and at the Salzburg Festival, where his post-war appearances covered the years between 1949 and 1955. Half of the programme of Knappertsbusch’s final Salzburg concert on 26 July 1955 has already been available on the Orfeo label (C 329 062 B). But the third work in this all-Brahms programme, Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in B flat major op. 83, with Sir Clifford Curzon as the soloist, has not previously been released. Curzon was making his Salzburg Festival début, and it is striking to note how the great chamber musician and Mozartian responds to Knappertsbusch’s thrilling reading, just as it is also fascinating to hear how the orchestral players, concentrating for all they are worth, react to it. Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in E major was recorded six years earlier, on 30 August 1949, also in the old Festspielhaus (C 655 061 B) and reveals Knappertsbusch’s very precise sense of the architectural structures of a work or, to quote the Viennese music critic Alexander Witeschnik, it demonstrates that Knappertsbusch was “one of the few great conductors still to possess the key to Bruckner’s heaven”. Please come in.

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