Salome Strauss

Teresa Stratas has been called the world's greatest living singing actress, and she is seen and heard at the peak of her powers in the title role of director Götz Friedrich's spine-chilling version of Salome. on of the most highly acclaimed opera films ever made - with Strauss's score in the expert hands of his protégé Karl Böhm, conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

This performance of Strauss' opera Salome, recorded in London, but based on an earlier performance at the Salzburg Festival, could be the perfect Salome on DVD for several years to come. In the first place the casting is superb. Malfitano and Terfel as Salome and Jokanaan are not to be surpassed in the next years. Malfitano does the Dance of the Seven Veils herself, which gives the performance an extra thrill. Herod is good too and as a bonus we see Anja Silja as Herodias, a well-known Salome herself in her younger days.

Following critical acclaim for their world premiere recording of Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly return with a new collaboration featuring some of the greatest works in the orchestral repertoire by Richard Strauss, including Also sprach Zarathustra and Till Eulenspiegel, recorded live at the opening concert of the Lucerne Festival, 2017.

Sony Classical announces another ten releases in its popular series of Classical Masters. This new batch of budget-priced sets contains major recording projects by some of the 20th centurys most celebrated musicians. Two boxes in this new batch of Original Masters feature Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The 4-album Richard Strauss set gathers together all of their early 1960s recordings of the famous tone poems along with Salomes Dance, the Rosenkavalier and Bürger als Edelmann suites, the Burleske with soloist Rudolf Serkin and the First Horn Concerto, featuring Philadelphia principal Mason Jones.

Transfiguration is acclaimed star soprano Camilla Nylund’s much-awaited first album of arias. This CD portrays the lyric-dramatic soprano with famous arias and scenes from operas by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, including the grueling final scenes from Tristan und Isolde and from Salome. The featured arias reflect the lyrical and dramatic facets of Camilla Nylund’s current roles at such venues as Staatsoper Dresden, Vienna State Opera, and Bayreuther Festspiele. The Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra is led by their chief conductor Hannu Lintu.

Josephs Legende (1912-14), die Partitur für Ballett von Richard Strauss, ist eines der reiferen Werke von Strauss, das selbst nach so langer Zeit bisher nur wenig Beachtung fand. Es wird nicht aufgeführt (möglicherweise wegen seines mysteriösen Themas) und nur selten aufgezeichnet. Der Katalog verzeichnet eine vollständige, inzwischen bereits vergriffene Interpretation, und eine Version der kürzeren Orchestersuite (1947), von der es bei Chandos 9506 eine ausgezeichnete Version gibt.

Filmed live in Baden-Baden by the veteran director Brian Large, Renée Fleming makes her debut in the role of Ariadne together with fellow key Strauss interpreters Sophie Koch and Christian Thielemann, following on from their Rosenkavalier triumph. Thielemann conducts the Staatskapelle Dresden, the orchestra to whom Strauss dedicated his Alpine Symphony and which premiered Feuersnot, Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier and Daphne. Fleming's voice might have been made for Ariadne and she achieved a great personal triumph in this production: “The chief glory of the evening was hearing Renée Fleming, the Straussian soprano par excellence, making her role debut as Ariadne… As the possessor of what is, possibly, the most beautiful soprano voice in the world, she put her vocal treasures in the service of an empathic, nuanced interpretation of the role. From the creamy top, through a rich, warm middle, to the bewitching, darker colours of her lower register, Fleming poured her magnificent sound into Strauss’s enchanting melodic arcs, animating the sadness, vulnerability, and desire of the bereft princess…” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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)

The epic grandeur of Der Rosenkavalier stems not just from its immense length (over three hours) but from the all-too-human complexity of its characters–each of whom is smitten with someone else–and the endless stream of graceful melodies the composer conjures. After the tonality-stretching dissonance of Salome and especially Elektra, Strauss moved onto a different musical path here: the music's sheer gorgeousness has given this most heartbreaking of 20th-century operas its pride of place in the repertory.