Four stars: Impressive performances that should find an appreciative audience

 STRAUSS Don Juan. Ein Heldenleben  Hans Graf, cond; Singapore SO  OUR 8.226934 (63:35) Reviewed from a WAV download: 44.1 kHz/16-bit

Curiosity led me to wonder why the album refers to Hans Graf, a conductor I’ve encountered before, mainly in recordings of music by Mozart, as Quantedge Music Director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. So, I looked it up. It turns out that Quantedge is a Singaporean investment management firm that sponsors the position of Music Director for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. That puzzlement clarified, I could now turn my full attention to this new recording of two of Richard Strauss’s familiar and favorite tone poems, Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life).
Composed in 1888, chronologically, Don Juan is the fourth in order of Strauss’s symphonic tone poems. Aus Italien (From Italy), his first attempt at the genre in 1886, didn’t meet with his hoped-for critical success. Sticking strictly to the chronology, Macbeth, op. 23, and Death and Transfiguration, op. 24, came next, before Don Juan, op. 20, but they received later opus numbers due to being premiered and published after Don Juan. In any case, all three works were composed virtually together between 1888 and 1889.
The orchestral resourcefulness and originality of the score to Don Juan and its story-telling ingenuity lit up the Weimar Opera House like a rocket going off for all those who heard Strauss conduct the piece for the first time on November 11, 1889. And to this day, Don Juan has remained not only one of the composer’s most often performed and recorded tone poems, but in terms of its compositional skill and brilliance, one of his best.
Fast forward 10 years to 1898 and Ein Heldenleben, the composer’s pre-penultimate symphonic tone poem. The last two, the Symphonia Domestica (1903) and An Alpine Symphony (1915), are the only two to be composed after the turn of the 20th century. Strauss would live another 34 years, until 1949, but with An Alpine Symphony he wrote the final chapter in his novel on the symphonic tone poem.
Anecdotal musical lore has perpetuated the belief that the narrative of Ein Heldenleben is autobiographical in nature and that Strauss himself is its putative hero, despite the fact that the composer denied said interpretation: “I'm no hero: I'm not made for battle,” he declared. And yet, it’s hard to ignore Strauss’s own remark to French author and novelist Romain Rolland in which he said that he found himself “no less interesting than Napoleon,” unless one takes it as tongue-in-cheek. Personally, I find Strauss more interesting than Napoleon, but whether Ein Heldenleben is a work of braggadocio and self-glorification, all one can really say is, “Who knows?”
One thing can be said for sure because Strauss freely admitted it, and that is that the third movement of the work, titled “The Hero’s Companion,” was in fact intended as a musical portrait of the composer’s wife, Pauline. One can infer from the difficulty of the extended solo violin part that Pauline was both capricious not an easy woman to live with. It’s said that the couple had a tempestuous relationship, but there’s tenderness and love in the music as well. There’d have to be for a marriage that lasted 55 years, from 1894 until Strauss’s death in 1949. Pauline survived him by just eight months. It may not have been the love story that movies are made of, like the 1947 film Song of Love about Robert and Clara Schumann, starring Katherine Hepburn. But Richard Strauss and Pauline lived, loved, and grew old together for over half a century.
Forgetting about all of the extra-musical, programmatic aspects of Ein Heldenleben, it departs in certain ways from Strauss’s earlier tone poems. Interestingly, the composer regarded Don Quixote, composed just the year prior, and Ein Heldenleben, as complementary works. He explicitly referred to them as “direct pendants,” an easy correlation to draw: one the hero, the other, the anti-hero.
In addition to the concertante nature of both scores—the obbligato parts for solo cello and viola in Don Quixote and the aforementioned solo violin part in Ein Heldenleben, these are the first of Strauss’s tone poems, I believe (but could be wrong), to require the largest orchestra he had so far scored for, and, in the case of Quixote, the first to include a non-musical instrument, namely, a wind machine. Another first, to the best of my knowledge, occurs in Heldenleben, specifically in the fourth movement, “The Hero’s Battlefield,” at bar 398 of the whole work, where Strauss has written an F, a half step below the violins’ bottom-most G string, requiring the players to temporarily tune their G strings down a half step. That’s a little factoid I hadn’t previously come across before, until I did a deeper dive into the score and discovered that it’s not some guarded secret; it’s a documented detail in various editions of the work.
It strikes me, however, that there’s something else different about Heldenleben that’s more significant than its instrumentation or short-duration scordatura tuning, and it goes to the fundamental structure of the piece. Tone poems such as Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and Till Eulenspiegel, as narrative-type program works go, tell a more or less continuous story. They spin a tale, whether of a lothario (Don Juan), the pranks of a peasant folk hero (Eulenspiegel) who upsets one too many of the temple’s money-changers and ends up getting himself hanged, or a dying man (in Death and Transfiguration) who struggles against the inevitable and in the end comes to embrace the wonderment and beauty of being borne away into the “infinite reaches of heaven.”
That model of a tone poem began to break down in Quixote and further unraveled in Heldenleben. There is no real continuous storyline in either one of them. Rather, Strauss presents us with a series of episodes in the lives of a hero and an anti-hero. They may be continuous in the sense that one episode flows into the next without pause, blurring the lines between sections or movements, but there’s no particular reason why, for example, “The Hero at Battle” (in Heldenleben), follows the “Hero’s Companion.” Strauss could have put the two movements in reverse order because no story, with its demands for logical progression in the actions and development of its characters, is being told. Instead, the sequence of movements is now being guided by musical principles of thematic development and contrast in tempos and content of material.
This, then, is why Ein Heldenleben hangs together, makes sense to us, and is ultimately a satisfying musical experience. It doesn’t really matter if Strauss is the hero or his companion is his wife. The squabbling of “The Hero’s Adversaries: can be seen as a scherzo, followed by “The Hero’s Companion,” an extended slow movement with a violin solo that resembles an operatic recitative and aria. I wish I could say that this is an original idea on my part, but it’s not. American musicologist James Arnold Hepokoski postulated that “that the whole work is in a massive version of sonata form. The three initial sections comprise an elaborate exposition, with elements of a multiple-movement symphony evident in their contrasting character and tempo. The remainder of the work comprises development, recapitulation, and coda, with occasional new thematic material.”
This becomes an important factor in reviewing this Heldenleben by Hans Graf and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. I don’t believe I’ve heard another performance of the work that imposes such a strong sense of structural logic on it. Whether Heldenleben is the” massive version of sonata form” that Hepokoski takes it to be, I don’t know. I only just reviewed a recording of Dvořák’s “Dumky” Piano Trio for this same issue, in which I came across an analysis of the piece that similarly wanted to fit it into a sonata-allegro form. Only Dvořák and Strauss could tell us if that was their intent, and unfortunately, we can’t ask them.
What I meant when I said that Graf’s Heldenleben imposes a strong sense of structural logic on the score, was that there’s a natural, logical flow to the work’s episodes or movements that shape the piece and give it an architectural sense of strength, balance, and beauty. What comes next seems to grow organically from what came before it. Listen, for example, to how the closing bars of “The Hero’s Companion” morphs seamlessly into “The Hero at Battle.” The transition isn’t just logical, it’s inevitable. Graf demonstrates a mastery over the macro-structure of the work that’s most impressive and highly satisfying.
Not incidentally, David Coucheron, Co-Principal Guest Concertmaster must be singled out for his commanding delivery of the really nasty violin solo in “The Hero’s Companion.” I described it earlier as like an operatic recitative and aria, but actually, it’s more like a cadenza without end that’s not only of extraordinary technical difficulty, but on top of getting all the notes right, the soloist has to play the coquette one moment and the hectoring henpecker the next. It’s as if Strauss wrote into the movement a veritable catalog of Pauline’s personality traits. Coucheron plays them all in perfect character.
While Graf’s Heldenleben is a commendable reading, in some ways outstanding, really, and surely more than worthy of a recommendation, it would be unrealistic to say that the Singapore players arrayed before him are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Reiner in their 1954 recording or the Berlin Ken Meltzer Philharmonic under Karajan in their 1959 recording, two versions that have become touchstones against which others are judged. That this performance by Graf conducting the Singapore Symphony Orchestra is as good as it is should automatically place it at a very respectable place in the listings.
Graf’s Don Juan is smart and snappy, and performed with penetrating focus on subtle details in the orchestration that the conductor brings to the listener’s attention. As with his Ein Heldenleben, Graf’s reading of Don Juan—his conception of the piece—is commanding and compelling. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t report that intonation in the horns is noticeably not edifying in some of their exposed passages. The orchestra was founded in 1979, which, in the long history of orchestral organizations, is practically yesterday. Comparing it to the great European and American orchestras is to insist on an impossible standard, and, in this case, irrelevant. Strongly recommended, in spite of some minor flaws in execution. Four stars: Impressive performances that should find an appreciative audience

 STRAUSS Don Juan. Ein Heldenleben  Hans Graf, cond; Singapore SO  OUR 8.226934 (63:35) Reviewed from a WAV download: 44.1 kHz/16-bit