American-born
conductor John Fiore's new recording of Strauss's Also sprach
Zarathustra (with the Düsseldorf Symphony) is the latest in a
long list of similar works. This version comes from a live
performance in May 2002 in the Düsseldorf Tonhalle, and inevitably
comparisons with the watermark performances by Reiner (RCA Living
Stereo 09026 61494-2) or even Karajan (DG 439 016-2) and Kempe
(EMI CDE 574756-2) are unavoidable.
John
Fiore (right, not to be confused with the actor from
Law and Order) is better
known as an operatic conductor than a symphonic one, one of his
more recent successes being the Santa Fe world premiere of Bright
Sheng's opera Madame Mao.
He has also been the musical director of the Düsseldorfers since
2000, and here his reading, for the most part, hits all the right
marks and brings out the struggle in Strauss's dichotomic writing
- the contest between C major and B minor, for instance, so close
in tonal proximity and yet so apart in character. Strauss's own
exposition Zarathustra
was, of course, broadly adapted as a set of free variations, based
on and arising from the opening "Ode to the Sun" motif, and even
more loosely drawn from Nietzsche's own philosophical treatise.
|
 Long
before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster invented the caped
superhero in 1938, Nietzsche had already written a set of
discourses and aphorisms entitled
Also sprach Zarathustra
("Thus Spoke Zarathustra"). The Persian Zarathustra was the
founder of the eponymous Zoroastrian movement, and
tradtionally the first to profess the dichotomy and conflict
between good and evil as one of the fundamental workings of
the physical world.
The
translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics found
great resonance with Nietzsche, who went on to categorically
reject the Christian ethic about resurrection redemption
through divine compassion. Instead, he espoused a superior
moral being who derived strength from the Dionysian lust of
existence, affirming famously that "God is dead... I give
you the Superman!" Richard Strauss himself was not
unsympathetic to these ideas, and would later on, go so far
as to dub his
Alpine Symphony as "the
Anti-Christian,
because in it there is moral purification by means of one's
own strength, liberation through work, worship of glorious,
eternal nature." |
The famous
"Ode to the Sun" sequence here,
curiously, lacks the
volume and gravitas which one might reasonably expect from a
modern digital recording, almost as if the producers were
reluctant to achieve a full-blooded
fortissimo. This problem
pops up again later in the section "Of Joys and Passions" with the
brasses not quite as strident and
marcatissimo as one might
hope for. In the solo quartet exchange in "Of the Backworldsmen",
the Düsseldorfers are slightly ponderous and don't quite nail the
comtemplative passage with as liberal amounts of
rubato as,
say, in Kaspszyk's and the LSO (Collins 30042) where you can
almost see the warm, glowing nimbus of the string quartet in the
same passage.
That said,
I don't feel that Fiore, as a symphonic conductor, misses all that
much of Strauss's subtleties of feeling than this recording lets
on. In the "Song of the Night Wanderer", he fully captures the
Superman's defiance in the ringing of the Midnight Bell, and Jens
Langeheine does an excellent solo turn on the violin in the
Tanzleid. The issue, I
think, lies in the way the
tonmeisters
have miked and balanced this live performance: by adopting a
traditional (I hesitate to say "Germanic") broad focus which
creates a homogenous sonic soundscape, at the expense of clarity
and detail. This is a common problem with live recordings where
elements of individuality tend to be "pushed back" into the bigger
picture.
Gerhard
Oppitz (left) joins the orchestra for the nineteen-minute
Burleske for Piano and Orchestra,
a piece of juvenilia from the 21-year-old composer. Oppitz, who
made his Singapore premiere in July 2004 with Beethoven's Third
Concerto, here establishes the piano's role with good humour from
the get-go, bringing out the jocularity in the rhythmic shifts and
syncopated harmonies. Fiore supports amply with a sense of drama
to Oppitz's musical machinations, and Oppitz sometimes also
presses the music forward with some alacrity.
The
Burleske
was also recorded live, earlier in November 2001, but as before,
the amplitude of the sound, while lush and full, tends towards a
flocculent ambience - and the audience presence curiously gives
little nothing towards a sense of involvement and occasion in
these recordings. The virtuosity of the Düsseldorfers and Oppitz,
or their response to Fiore, is not in question here; I'm sure
that, on the occasion, these were superb performances. But the
sound could have done with a bit more tweaking to bring out the
sharpness and clarity that one has come to expect from modern
digital recordings.
