Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie / Rosenkavalier Suite - Christian Thielemann / Wiener Philharmoniker [Import]

Richard Strauss (Composer), Christian Thielemann (Conductor), Wiener Philharmoniker (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Wiener Philharmoniker
• Conductor: Christian Thielemann
• Composer: Richard Strauss
• Audio CD (March 1, 2001)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Dg Imports
• ASIN: B00005AAFA
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #225,677 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A few shaky steps on the way up the mountain, July 27, 2003

By 

Paul Bubny "Paul Bubny" (Maplewood, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie / Rosenkavalier Suite - Christian Thielemann / Wiener Philharmoniker (Audio CD)

Christian Thielemann clearly believes in Richard Strauss' once-derided "Alpensinfonie," and you don't need to read the conductor's comments in the liner notes to grasp that he revels in Strauss' orchestration. It's in delineating the many strands of the orchestral texture that Thielemann excels here, aided considerably by a fired-up Vienna Philharmonic (the brasses in particular are outstanding--such as the raspy trombones which are noticeably repressed in the Herbert von Karajan recording).

Thielemann's enthusiasm sometimes gets the better of him, to the detriment of the work's structural integrity. Compared to Karajan or Rudolf Kempe, you're more aware listening to this CD that the piece moves from scene to scene. It isn't helped by his tendency to draw out the endings of phrases and sometimes slack off on the pace--effects which probably played better in concert than they do captured for posterity. However, the conductor's occasional missteps aren't enough to send the performance skidding back down the mountain.

What does threaten to jeopardize the expedition, though, is the recording job--a major consideration in a "blockbuster" work like this. The sense of scale and dynamic range are impressive, but there's a frustrating lack of "depth" and "presence" to the instruments. It's like listening to vividly detailed cardboard cutouts in a reverberant hall, instead of three-dimensional strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion. The Amazon "editorial review" for this release gets it just right when referring to the sonics as "two-dimensional." The third dimension, the sense of "you are there" realism, that you get from well-recorded CDs (such as Andre Previn's Telarc disc of this piece with the same orchestra in the same hall) is utterly lacking here. Maybe the SACD version (which I haven't heard) imparts more presence, but in the standard CD format the spatial resolution is quite limited. Disappointing, coming from one of the world's major record labels.

Perhaps due to the misjudged engineering, a few of the details go awry: The distant "hunting horns" are TOO distant; the "cowbells" in the "mountain pasture" sequence don't sound at all natural; and the wind machine in the "thunderstorm and descent" is only sporadically audible.

Despite these technical slips (which may be less annoying to some), on the whole Thielemann ably takes us up the mountain and back down again, revealing features of the terrain we may not have been aware of before. Once we're back in the lowlands, Thielemann and Co. give us an equally idiomatic account of the 1945 "Rosenkavalier Suite" which was apparently assembled by the conductor Artur Rodzinski (with help, according to one story, from his assistant, Leonard Bernstein), rather than by the 80-year-old Strauss.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sonic and interpretative feast, April 19, 2009

By 

Ralph Moore "Ralph operaphile" (Bishop's Stortford, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie / Rosenkavalier Suite - Christian Thielemann / Wiener Philharmoniker (Audio CD)

Well, responses to music are notoriously subjective but I am mystified by some of the criticisms I have read of this disc; if you were to trust them you would think that it is a sub-standard dud in almost every way. It seems to me that, for example, both the official Amazon.com reviewer Dan Davis and the BBC Music Magazine back in 2001 got it totally wrong. However, as is often the case, I am with trusted reviewers such as the Santa Fe listener on this one: it is a magnificent, newly thought-out, thrilling performance that elicited a host of encomiums from the Viennese music press who heard it live in October 2000. It has all of the advantages of a live performance when things "click" and virtually none of the attendant disadvantages; the audience are very well behaved and the recording engineers did a great job in bringing out the multiple layers of this vast work. Yes, if you compare it with studio recordings occasionally a line might be a little too recessed or an individual instrument submerged, but it strikes me as absurd to moan that the wind machine is sometimes inaudible or that the balance is artificial; it sounds to me like a faithful reproduction of the ambience in the Grosse Saal. All I know is that the disc sounds fabulous on my Bose, on speakers, or through Sennheiser headphones and I was bowled over by the virtuosity of the Vienna Philharmoniker (virtually flawless live; no re-takes or splicing here), the subtlety and grandeur of Thielemann's conception and the brilliance and immediacy of the sound. It goes straight to the top of my list of favourite recordings (alongside the BPO/Mehta and the Weimar Staatskapelle/Wit versions) - not just of this piece but of live recordings in general.

I assume that the criticisms of the "Rosenkavalier" suite here are the natural corollary to already having taken against Thielemann's interpretative style in Strauss; again, I loved the detail and flexibility of tempi in his account. He seems to me, in his use of rubato, to be daring to recapture a vanished style of conducting. Those who don't like it are free to seek out those many modern conductors who espouse the more mechanistic, homogenised and metronomic approach so widespread today.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very imaginative account, with an incomparable orchestra, September 22, 2007

By 

Santa Fe Listener (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie / Rosenkavalier Suite - Christian Thielemann / Wiener Philharmoniker (Audio CD)

I am usually not a great fan of Thielemann's soft-grained condcuting, but he scores a triumph here. Strauss's Alpine Sym. has traveled the long road from sneered-at hokum to a genuine orchestral blockbuster taken up by every virtuoso orchestra. To earn its keep, most conductors ignore musical values in favor of raw showmanship. but not Thielemann, who wants us to hear every bar as sincere nature poetry, just as we listen to Beethoven's Pastorale. It worked for me -- I actually felt something subtler than the wow factor. By reining in the bombastic rhetoric, he has done something quite special, and the Vienna Phil. continues to astound. I am especially grateful to DG's engineers for capturing the actual flavor of the VPO -- this CD is about as close to the real thing as I've ever experienced.