Customer Reviews

Richard Strauss: Piano Music

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I have to disagree with the rather dismissive comments by the other reviewer. I found this music to be worthwhile to listen to and the performances to be excellent.
Yes, I am happy to admit that I do very much like Schumann and thus also enjoy Schumanesque music - and this music admittedly is certainly that rather more than it is 'Straussian'. But also I ardently enjoy all of Strausses music and so it is very interesting to hear his early pieces and thus come to a greater appreciation of his development - especially since once his personal style had developed (to an astonishingly rapid extent by as early as Op.20) it did not seem to develop much further, even though he lived so long and wrote so much (how many people know his 'Couperin Suite' for example? - and I regard these early piano pieces far above that much later one!).

Richard Strauss was not noted for his piano music. Those familiar with his music casually associate him with his post-Wagnerian orchestral tone poems and operas. There are, of course, his piano-and-orchestra work, 'Burleske', and the marvelous piano accompaniments to the many lieder he wrote. But hardly anyone knows his solo piano works. Indeed, they are hardly ever played -- I've never heard a one of them in recital -- and that's because they don't particularly have the 'Richard Strauss sound' and hardly ever rise above a certain tuneful charm. Like the early piano music of others of the era, they sound more like Schumann or Mendelssohn, and occasionally Brahms. The works presented here were all written in his final years in school, the latest when he was in his early twenties.

The Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 3, consist of entirely pleasant and entirely negligible works, ranging in length from three to seven minutes. The opening horn calls of the second piece sound remotely like later Strauss but the piece soon evolves into a Mendelssohnian character piece. The counterpoint in the last piece is really quite expert and presages Strauss's later ease with complex contrapuntal writing.

The Piano Sonata, Op. 5, was the third he wrote but the only one ever published. In the usual four movements, the twenty-minute work could possibly be mistaken for a work by Mendelssohn, especially in the leggieramente middle section of the second movement and in the Scherzo. Tuneful, charming it is; profound it is not. It is superior salon music.

'Stimmungsbilder' (called by its English publishers 'Moods and Fancies') is more Schumannesque than the preceding pieces. It is in five movements:

I. Auf stillem Waldespfad (In Silent Forests)
II. An einsamer Quelle (Beside the Spring)
III. Intermezzo
IV. Träumerei (Reverie)
V. Heidebild (On the Heath)

which sound for all the world as if they could have been taken from one of Schumann's collections of character pieces such as the 'Kinderszenen.'

Stefan Veselka is known to me only from his recording of another composer's rather negligible piano music, the complete piano music of Antonin Dvorák. He is a fine but not especially characterful pianist if one judges by these two releases. He is given amply clear and slightly resonant recorded sound on this CD of somewhat more than an hour's music. This one is for Richard Strauss completists only, I'm afraid.

Scott Morrison