Fanfare 3

Four stars: Well-played, exciting versions of two of Richard Strauss’s most recorded pieces


R. STRAUSS Don Juan. Ein Heldenleben • Hans Graf, cond; Singapore SO • OUR RECORDINGS 8 226934 (63:35) Reviewed from a WAV download: https://www.ourrecordings.com/albums/a-hero's-life

This was a real surprise coming from OUR Recordings, since my previous experiences with reviewing them had been either releases of unusual repertoire (like Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s extended solo guitar suite Platero y Yo or the works of Axel Borup-Jørgensen) or quite impressive performances of works on the edge of the mainstream (like Henrik Dam Thomsen’s remarkable renditions of Bach’s six solo cello suites). I wasn’t expecting them to release a recording of standard orchestral repertoire like Richard Strauss’s tone poems Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben with a peripheral orchestra and a little-known German conductor.
It turned out that Hans Graf isn’t as little-known as I’d thought. He was born February 15, 1949 in Marchtrenk, Austria and studied piano and conducting at the Musikhochschule in Graz (also the home town of Arnold Schwarzenegger, by the way). He took master classes in conducting from Sergiu Celibidache, Franco Ferrara, and Arvīds Jansons. Graf first “made his bones” as a conductor in Baghdad, Iraq, where he was music director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in the 1975-76 season.
Since then Graf has led the sort of peripatetic lifestyle typical of the handful of top-flight conductors in the world today. His peregrinations have taken him from the Vienna State Opera in 1981 to the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg (1984-1994), with whom he recorded the complete Mozart symphonies for Capriccio. Then he went on to lead the Basque National Orchestra (1994-1996), the Calgary Philharmonic (1995-2003), the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine (1998-2004), the Houston Symphony (2000-2013), and the Singapore Symphony, where he was appointed music director in 2019 after six seasons as a guest conductor.
Graf’s current title with the Singapore Symphony is “Quantedge Music Director.” Quantedge is an international hedge fund based both in Singapore and New York, and apparently as one of the conditions for donating to the orchestra they got naming rights to the music director. That couldn’t help but remind me of those preposterous TV commercials in which parents sell their children’s names to local businesses in exchange for contributions to the cost of raising them. Graf is scheduled to retire from the Singapore Symphony at the end of the 2025-2026 season, and it’s understandable why he should want to leave behind a souvenir of how well he’s built this orchestra before he departs.
The performances of Richard Strauss’s Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) here are excellent, energetic, and well played. There’s nothing really wrong with them, and if somehow you’ve escaped encountering these works before, this CD will give you a quite acceptable (indeed, better than acceptable) idea of them. The only problem with this disc is the sheer amount of competition in these oft-recorded pieces.
I must confess that I never particularly liked Don Juan until I encountered a recording of it by the late James DePreist conducting the Oregon Symphony. I got this as a three-inch CD single (a blessedly short-lived format) on Delos in the cut-out bin of a record store (ya remember record stores?) in the early 1990s. I bought it mostly for the novelty value of a three-inch classical CD, but when I got it home and played it I was blown away by the sheer intensity of the music and DePreist’s performance of it.
I wasn’t that impressed by Ein Heldenleben either when I first heard it on an album of five 12-inch 78rpm records given to me by my grandfather. It was a late-1930’s Victor recording by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it was fun but not ground-breaking. Then I heard Fritz Reiner’s version—not the iconic one with Chicago in RCA’s “Living Stereo” from the 1950s, but his earlier recording with the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1947—and the work came alive for me. I know the consensus choices for the work are Reiner/Chicago and, for an historical recording, Mengelberg/New York Philharmonic from 1928, but I got Mengelberg’s on LP at the same time I obtained an LP reissue of Richard Strauss’s own recording from Berlin in 1926, and Strauss’s version just seemed more exciting. (Reason enough that, though Strauss dedicated the piece to Mengelberg, he aced the Dutchman out of the premiere and led it himself!)
Graf’s Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben with the Singapore Symphony don’t stand out among the competition, but they are both perfectly competent and quite well-played performances. Anyone who needs these works in renditions that project the excitement they should have can’t go wrong here. Mark Gabrish Conlan