Salzburg Festival 2012: Strauss, Wagner, Brahms

Jansons leads strikingly affectionate performances of these works
This concert from the 2012 Salzburg Festival received rapturous applause from the packed audience as well as enthusiastic press coverage. The style of the performances has much in common with another recent issue by Jansons with the Bavarian orchestra by emphasising the warm and tonally rich characteristics of the music and by having orchestras with the tonal and technical resources capable of portraying such views to advantage.

The concert opens with that very well known tone poem by Richard Strauss, his Don Juan. This piece opens with a striding horn motif which we can take to be a portrayal of Don Juan in up-beat hunting mode. There is a very egotistical element about this theme that vividly portrays that side of Don Juan and it has lead to many memorable displays of horn playing. Performances led by Reiner, Szell and Solti for example, have been etched into the memory of record collectors through this figure which finally occurs in full glory towards the end. In between...

Taking the scenic (and cinematic) route
This release is an odd one, primarily due to the idiosyncratic style of Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons. He's had a long and distinguished career and is well represented in the Blu-ray format, but I have not had the opportunity to become familiar with his performances. Based on the evidence of this disc, he tends to luxuriate in the sound textures of the orchestra, especially when the famously sumptuous Vienna Philharmonic strings come into play. It creates a rather cinematic quality, and this approach serves him particularly well in the first two pieces on the program, Richard Strauss' "Don Juan" and Richard Wagner's "Wesendonck Lieder."

The tone poem "Don Juan" receives a somewhat eccentric reading, but a mesmerizing one. The greater transparency and clarity of the Blu-ray's DTS 5.0 audio accentuates the Vienna players' diaphanous waves of sound. For a composer like Strauss, who's so adept at highlighting the many colors of the orchestra, Jansons' style works...



Click to Editorial Reviews