Richard Strauss Heimliche Aufforderung Op. 27 n. 3 (with score) скачать в хорошем качестве

Richard Strauss Heimliche Aufforderung Op. 27 n. 3 (with score)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Heimliche Aufforderung Op. 27 n. 3 (with score) Peter Bannister - baritone, piano Recorded at Les Arches Musicales, Cluny, France Transept Music Productions 2026 Was Richard Strauss, as he himself once half-jokingly remarked, a "first-class second-rate composer"? Even leaving aside the tragic ambiguity of his attitude towards the Third Reich, when his opportunist streak would lead him at least initially to inglorious compromise with the régime (although he was cleared of all charges by the Allies during the post-1945 de-nazification process), Strauss's place in music history remains controversial. One reason for this, it might be contended, is that while his musical vocabulary is thoroughly steeped in Romanticism, it can be hard to work out when Strauss is actually speaking "in the first person" - the very essence of the 19th century Romantic ethos - as opposed to engaging in musical depiction for maximum effect or shock value (he famously quipped that his music was capable of portraying the difference between a Pilsener and Kulmbacher beer!). There are of course instances in which Strauss attains to a genuine profundity of expression that is clearly not stage-managed (Metamorphosen (1945) perhaps being the supreme large-scale example), but the unsettling question frequently arises for the listener to his music: "will the real Richard Strauss please stand up?" Or, to put it still more bluntly, "is he being sincere or simply pretending?" It is here that the composer's Lieder perhaps provide an answer, given that the intrinsic limits of the genre naturally find Strauss at his least pretentious, as if protected by the small-scale setting against the temptation simply to dazzle with technique or to innovate for innovation's sake. Even those who struggle with the bombast of Ein Heldenleben or the Alpine Symphony can appreciate songs such as those of his early Op. 27 cycle of 1894 (which famously finishes with the evergreen 'Morgen'), in which Strauss provides one of the pinnacles of the post-Wagnerian Lied with 'Heimliche Aufforderung'. If John Henry Mackay's text may indeed be termed second-rate, Strauss's writing most certainly cannot. The spontaneous melodic expression of universal human experience, natural phrase-construction and seamless modulation are reassuring in that they demonstrate that Strauss did indeed possess the timeless qualities of musicianship of the highest order and was not simply 'outrageously talentless, yet quite full of pretensions', as Tchaikovsky cruelly remarked in 1888. Strauss's innate musicality would sometimes arguably be obscured by his 'Trickkiste' (box of tricks) in the course of his long career, perhaps to the detriment of his art, yet it would nonetheless survive until the very end, when again it would be Lieder that would bring them to the fore one final time - in his Four Last Songs. PB (It is interesting to listen to Strauss's own performance of 'Heimliche Aufforderung', accompanying the baritone Alfred Poell (1900-1968) with admirable virtuosity, especially considering that he reached 80 in the year of the recording (1944). Also noteworthy is his ability to adapt to a fair degree of rhythmic imprecision on the part of the soloist. As with the recording from the same period by Heinrich Schlusnus (1888-1952), the first bar of the piano accompaniment is repeated, departing from the published score.)