Fanfare 9
*****

STRAUSS Don Juan.1 Ein Heldenleben2 • Hans Graf, cond; Singapore SO • OUR 8.226934 (63:35) Live: 17/28 and 29/2022, 27/27 and 28/2023
The veteran Austrian maestro Hans Graf has received some very positive notices in these pages, going back some 35 years now (!) for his stylish Mozart conducting with the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg (very favorably reviewed by David K. Nelson in Fanfare 14:2). Also warmly received by Paul A. Snook (in 37:3) was a disc of Hindemith’s complete music for viola and orchestra. More recently, he has garnered acclaim for recordings made during his tenure as music director of the Houston Symphony. I would particularly single out his recordings of Berg’s Wozzeck, which met with nearly universal acclaim in a competitive field and the Zemlinsky rarity Es war einmal. Not as successful in my view (but not reviewed in Fanfare) was his recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, though there the blemish was not Graf’s impeccable musical direction but the vocal problems of the mezzo-soprano.
Now we find Graf in quite a climate change, conducting as music director of the Singapore Symphony (where he has been since 2020) in a program of about as mainstream “hothouse” (to continue the metaphor) Strauss Tondichtungen as you can find. I didn’t precisely know what to expect from the Singapore Symphony, but my nonmusical interactions with lawyers, judges, and government officials in that country have taught me that the pursuit of excellence in all endeavors is a national characteristic.
So too, here: these are excellent performances of music that, though worthy of the sobriquet “warhorses,” is nonetheless extremely challenging to perform well. The Singaporeans’ rendition of Don Juan, in particular, is played with considerable panache and captures the exciting passages at the A-level of orchestral playing. Don Juan is the same famous but fictional libertine and serial seducer of women that emerged from Renaissance Spain and was the subject of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. It is probably no coincidence that Strauss (himself a famed Mozart opera conductor) conducted that work shortly before beginning his own tone poem. Yet Strauss’s Don Juan, based on Nikolaus Lenau’s unfinished take on the story, is different from Mozart’s Don. Rather like Andy Warhol’s satirical film Dracula, a tragicomic figure constantly in search of the blood of a virgin and surrounded and seduced by besotted women all claiming to be virgins, Lenau’s Don is vainly searching for the “perfect” woman and, in despair and disillusionment at his lack of success, decides to end it all.
Strauss’s musical portrayal dwells on few of those nuances, however. Indeed, it’s difficult, when listening to this music, and this fine performance in particular, not to have a mental image of Errol Flynn in the 1948 film romancing smitten ladies and dueling with their enraged husbands. Graf and the Singaporeans, in addition to turning in a fine performance of this work, are ably promoted by some of the best recorded sound in the business, courtesy of OUR Records. All in all, this is a very pleasurable reacquaintance with an old friend. Graf and his swashbuckling band will not quite displace iconic recordings of this score by Kempe, Reiner, or Karajan, but it is quite an accolade that his performance can be considered in that mighty company.
Ein Heldenleben is altogether a different kettle of fish. Though cast as a series of pseudo-autobiographical episodes, the piece is actually something of a hybrid between a unitary symphonic poem and a concertante for violin. Graf turns in a reasonably mainstream performance in terms of timing at about 45 minutes, comparable to Karajan, Clemens Krauss, and Ormandy, but nowhere near as brisk as Beecham, Toscanini, Mengelberg, or the astonishingly fast renditions recorded (in wretched sound, alas) by the composer, coming in at less than 38 minutes!
As is well known, the orchestral writing is demanding and even more of a challenge to bring off than Don Juan. Here again, for a little-known orchestra, the Singaporeans are surprisingly fine, particularly in the segments depicting the hero’s nasty, spiteful critics. Some segments of the score, such as the battle sequences, are notoriously difficult, and while the Singaporeans are not wholly successful, their overall performance garlands them in glory. Once again, the Kempe, Karajan, and Reiner (to which I would add a personal fondness for Rodzinski with Cleveland) are secure in the recorded pantheon. But this is a perfectly fine performance, superlatively recorded, and one to which I will gladly return for future hearings. Keith R. Fisher

https://www.fanfarearchive.com/articles/atop/49_4/4940740.aa_STRAUSS_Don_Juan_1.html