The Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons — 2006 biography — is the chief conductor of both the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). From 2008 until 2015, he was the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO). With the CBSO, Nelsons recorded a notable Richard Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra. Don Juan. Till Eulenspiegel album in 2014 (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de). In 2022, with the Gewandhaus and the BSO as well as the pianist Yuja Wang and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, he has released a great Richard Strauss 7-CD-box simply entitled Strauss (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
These recordings of compositions by Richard Strauss (1864-1949) were made between 2017 and 2021. In the booklet, Andris Nelsons is quoted with the words: “Strauss’s music is a kaleidoscope of moods and tone colors filled with emotionality, with orchestral brilliance, and oftentimes with humour.” Regarding the orchestras, Nelsons added: “The transparency of the Gewandhausorchester, for example, can be traced to the influence of Bach and Mendelssohn, whereas the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s stems from its strong French influences.”
Intentional or not, my MP3 downloads start with the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from the opera Salome (op. 54 from 1905) although it can only be found on CD6. The “Dance of the Seven Veils” is popular with the public and one of the highlights of the 7-CD-Box.
In 1902, Richard Strauss witnessed a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (originally written in French and first published in 1891) at Kleines Theater in Berlin in a production by the famous theatre and film director Max Reinhardt, translated into the German by Hedwig Lachmann. Richard Strauss was impressed to the point that he immediately began to work on an opera based on the Lachmann translation; the opera was first performed in Dresden in 1905.
The opera Salome takes place at the palace of King Herod Antipas (Herodes), Salome is his stepdaughter and niece who performs the famous, erotic dance, taking off one veil after another. The combination of the biblical with an erotic and murderous theme shocked opera goers. Richard Strauss wrote the part of Herod for a tenor, the one of Salome for a soprano, her mother Herodias, the wife and sister-in-law of Herod, was written for a mezzo-soprano. The rendition by Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhaus Orchestra is purely instrumental. The dramatic beginning is striking. In roughly ten minutes — which is on the long end of interpretations — listeners witness only musically Salome removing one veil after the other, until she lies naked at Herod’s feet. According to Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (Yale University Press, 2002; Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk), Richard Strauss himself had declared that the dance should be “thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat.” In reality, many performances were and are deliberately erotic, sexy, which is — apart from the quality of the music — one reason why the piece became so popular.
On CD number 7 (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de), you can listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s emotional rendition of the “Love Scene” from the sung poem Feuersnot (op. 50 from 1901), ending in a climax. In addition, the BSO, Yo-Yo Ma on cello and Steven Ansell on viola are offering a valuable interpretation of the tone poem Don Quixote (op. 35 from 1897), based on the novel by Cervantes.
Other highlights of the 7-CD-box include the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig’s excellent rendering of the glorious, bombastic beginning of Also sprach Zarathustra called «Sunrise», which film fans know from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odessey (DVD, Blu-Ray from Amazon USA, Amazon UK), as well as the first haunting, then majestic «On the Glacier» as well as the dramatic «Thunderstorm, descent», all from An Alpine Symphony (op. 64 from 1915).
The alliance of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra was initiated by conductor Andris Nelsons in 2018 (German article) with the aim of forging a closer bond between his two orchestras. The cooperation between the two orchestras extends from a regular exchange of musicians to joint commissions and coordinated programming, notably in the form of an annual Leipzig Week in Boston and a Boston Week in Leipzig, as well as guest concerts and touring projects.
However, the ties between the Gewandhaus and the BSO go back much further: among the 1881 founders of the BSO were members of the Gewandhaus, a number of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music directors either studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, were members of the Gewandhausorchester or, like Arthur Nikisch in the past and Andris Nelsons today, were principal conductors of both orchestras. Furthermore, the Boston Symphony Hall was inspired by the original Gewandhaus building, which was destroyed in the Second World War. Built in 1900, the Boston Symphony Hall became the first auditorium designed in accordance with scientifically derived acoustical principles. The result: the acoustics in Boston are among the best in the world and better than in Leipzig today.
As for Richard Strauss, he had conducted both the Gewandhaus and the BSO. In 1904, the conductor appeared at a Pension Fund Concert that was part of his first extended tour of North America. At this one and only time conducting the BSO, he featured works by Beethoven and Wagner as well as three of his own compositions: Don Juan, Don Quixote and the “Love Scene” from his opera Feuersnot. He wrote home enthusiastically: “The Boston orchestra is wonderful, its sound and its technique attesting to a perfection that I’ve rarely encountered.”
Among the household gods of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, founded in 1781, were Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Bruckner. Therefore, during his early career, Richard Strauss worked mainly with rival orchestras in Leipzig before the doors of the Gewandhaus were opened to him in 1887, when the then 23-year-old composer made his Gewandhaus debut with his F minor Symphony. Shortly afterwards, Arthur Nikisch emerged as one of Strauss’s most ardent champions, regularly programming his works, appointing Strauss the orchestra’s first regular guest conductor in 1907 and organizing a cycle of all nine of Strauss’s tone poems during his penultimate season in 1920/21. At the Leipzig Neues Theater, meanwhile, the Gewandhausorchester performed many of Strauss’s operas, often immediately after their Dresden premieres. Starting in 1915, Richard Strauss himself conducted performances of Salome, Elektra and– during his final visit to Leipzig in 1934 – Arabella. The annals of the Gewandhausorchester also feature a worldpremiere – in 1932 the orchestra’s principal conductor Bruno Walter conducted the first performance of the orchestral suite from Strauss’s ballet Schlagobers. The following year, Bruno Walter was driven from Leipzig on account of his Jewish heritage, while Strauss accepted the presidencyof the National Socialists’ Reichsmusikkammer.
In total Richard Strauss conducted five concerts and eight opera performances with the Gewandhausorchester. Apart from Nikisch, who conducted surprisingly few of Strauss’s works in Boston, two later Gewandhauskapellmeister have programmed comparable surveys of Strauss’s output: Kurt Masur and Riccardo Chailly.
These historical facts also played a role when the present repertory was divided up between the two orchestras. Andris Nelsons remarked: “The recordings of Don Quixote with the Boston musicians and the incomparable Yo-Yo Ma and of the ‘Love Scene’ from Feuersnot pay homage to Strauss’s own performances of the pieces in Boston. Symphonia Domestica was premiered by Strauss in New York during his tour of the United States in 1904. The Gewandhausorchester’s recordings of Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ and the Rosenkavalier Suite celebrate the orchestra’s opera tradition; Burleske, brilliantly performed by Yuja Wang, expresses the youthful exuberance of a young Strauss, who was still to establish himself in Leipzig’s music scene; while the Schlagobers orchestral suite, including the ‘Schlagoberswalzer’, was given its premiere performance in Leipzig.”
The late Metamorphosen was recorded with the Gewandhaus strings: this is a piece that expresses a sense of grief at the disappearance of an entire culture, which for Strauss was manifest in the destruction of many important places of cultural interest at the end of the Second World War. Among these places was the second Gewandhaus, where in 1940 the Gewandhausorchester made an early recording of the Festliches Präludium under its principal conductor Hermann Abendroth – the very work with which the present unique alliance project was launched some eighty years later.
Andris Nelsons, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Yuja Wang, Jo-Jo Ma: Strauss. Deutsche Grammophon, 2022. Order the Richard Strauss 7-CD-Box, download the MP3 files or stream the Strauss recordings by Nelsons from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
Check my 2006 article about Andris Nelsons, when he was at the beginning of his career.
Conductor Andris Nelsons photographed by © Marco Borggreve / Deutsche Grammophon.
Pianist Yuja Wang photographed by © Peter Adamik / Deutsche Grammophon.
Andris Nelsons, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Yuja Wang, Jo-Jo Ma: Strauss. Deutsche Grammophon, 2022. Order the Richard Strauss 7-CD-Box, download the MP3 files or stream the Strauss recordings by Nelsons from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations of the booklet of this CD-box review are not always put between quotation marks. Beauty items at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
7-CD-box review added on December 8, 2022 at 15:16 German time.
