Richard Strauss. Capriccio

The four works on this album, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works of Richard Strauss’s Indian Summer – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimised in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed native folk music and jazz.

Herbert von Karajan was an Austrian conductor. He was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for 34 years. During the Nazi era, he debuted at the Salzburg Festival, with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and during World War II he conducted at the Berlin State Opera. Generally regarded as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, he was a controversial but dominant figure in European classical music from the mid-1950s until his death. Part of the reason for this was the large number of recordings he made and their prominence during his lifetime. By one estimate, he was the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, having sold an estimated 200 million records.

For her third disc, the young Korean violinist Sueye Park has explored the repertoire for solo violin, and chosen works spanning exactly 100 hundred years – from Max Reger’s Prelude and Fugue from 1909 to Penderecki’s Capriccio, composed in 2008. Framing the 20th century, the programme starts as a relay race of famous violinist-composers; Reger dedicating his piece to Kreisler, who dedicated his Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice to Ysaÿe, who wrote his Sonata No. 6 for the Spanish virtuoso Manuel Quiroga. In this series of names, that of Richard Strauss may come as a surprise, but his little-known Daphne-Etüde from 1945 is also dedicated to a violinist – his young grandson.

The circumstances surrounding the composition and first performance of the Suite in B flat major, Op 4, were to prove enormously significant for Strauss’s career. Von Bülow decided to give the premiere of the new work in Munich in the winter of 1884 during an orchestral tour. Furthermore, since the players had already familiarized themselves with the music in Meiningen that autumn, he thought it would be appropriate if the composer himself conducted this performance according to his own interpretation.

In this unusual recording Andreas Skouras demonstrates the tremendous range of tonal and expressive possibilities offered by the harpsichord. The program is highly personal but also dramaturgically cogent: A selection from the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti is juxtaposed with four works from the 20th century.

In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the greatest media event in classical music, Sony Classical released in 2015 a complete edition of all the works ever played at the Wiener Philharmoniker’s New Year’s Concerts. Performed in the “Golden Hall” of the Musikverein between 1941 and 2015, the iconic live performances were issued for the first time in a single box set of 23 CDs. Now, in 2020, this edition will be available as a 26-CD extended version, with all the new repertoire from the last five years compiled on three additional CDs.

There were occasions during the three decades when the LP record ruled supreme - from the 1950s to the 1970s - when the chemistry between an orchestra, its conductor and their record company combined to work a magic that the commitment of long-term recording contracts quite often made possible. Karajan and the Philharmonia; Ansermet and the Suisse Romande; Dorati and the Minneapolis; Münch and the Boston Symphony, Cluytens and the Paris Conservatoire and Previn and the London Symphony are all prime examples of such collaborations. All of these produced recorded performances that are as fine today as they ever were and are all well-represented in the current CD catalogues. Until now there has been one successful recording collaboration that seems almost to have slipped under the radar: the Pittsburgh Symphony, William Steinberg and the Capitol Records producer, Richard C. Jones.

Herbert von Karajan’s Strauss recordings of the early 1980s, remastered in the 1990s, for the Karajan Gold Edition are a benchmark of lifetime of engagement with the composer in the concert hall and studio, and won unparalleled critical acclaim. For the first time they have been brought together in a specially priced single box. ”The greatest Strauss conductor of his day“ (The Penguin Guide)