COMPOSERS: R Strauss,Wagner
LABELS: Telarc
ALBUM TITLE: R Strauss, Wagner
WORKS: Four Last Songs; Tod und Verklärung
PERFORMER: Christine Brewer (soprano); Atlanta Symphony Orchestra/Donald Runnicles
CATALOGUE NO: CD 80661
Christine Brewer and Donald
Runnicles made an incandescent
team in a Barbican concert Tristan
und Isolde spread over three widelyspaced
evenings (see Opera Choice,
p75) – careful circumstances akin
to a legendary recorded Tristan
featuring the other most beautifullysung
Isolde of our time, Margaret
Price, with Carlos Kleiber. While
Brewer’s Liebestod, gleaming with
characteristic generosity of spirit, may
lack the last degree of Price’s more
centred radiance, she almost makes
up for the shocking absence of a
studio Four Last Songs from the other
great soprano. It’s a long time since
we’ve had such a richly-gilded sound
in this repertoire, darker colours in
the lower register moving seamlessly
to luminous tone above the stave, and
when Strauss really lets the text take
precedence over soaring opulence
of line, at the start of the third and
fourth songs, Brewer inflects the
words with evident sympathy.
The Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra under Runnicles sounds
equally glorious, in warmly lit and
irreproachably balanced sound
that lends a striking realism to the
individual colours of the woodwind
solos and the gauzy sickroom
atmosphere at the start of Death and
Transfiguration. Runnicles can be
sluggish – not, I think, in the Tristan
Prelude where he establishes a slow
burn for a dramatic payoff once
orchestral dialogues begin to kindle,
but the childhood memories of the
tone poem and ‘Autumn’ in the Four
Last Songs feel unnecessarily torpid.
Those are small faults against the
rhythmic definition, firmly etched
bass lines and admirably textured
ensembles crucial to all three works
here – singular and fresh enough to
stand in their own right within this
thoughtful programme. David Nice