Five stars: A civilized hero’s life from Singapore.

R. STRAUSS Don Juan. Ein Heldenleben  Hans Graf, cond; Singapore SO  OUR Recordings 8.226934 (63:35)

The Singapore Symphony is a very fine orchestra. I have family in that city, and have heard the orchestra in concert several times. Under their former long-serving musical director Lan Shui they recorded for BIS music by, among others, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and the 20th century Russian/American composer Alexander Tcherepnin. Since Shui moved on in 2019, their chief conductor has been Hans Graf, familiar from his time in Canada, Europe, and the US. Under Graf it seems the orchestra may have moved to a new recording partner, OUR Recordings. This Danish label is owned and programmed by lutenist/guitarist Lars Hannibal and the recorder virtuoso Micala Petri. The move is good news if so, because of OUR’s high standard of sound quality, and the fact that the company is expanding both in output and international reputation. Two of last year’s most acclaimed classical releases came from them: Kabalevsky and Schumann Cello Concertos, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s solo guitar work Platero. Both appeared in Fanfare Want Lists.
On this new release, as expected, the sound is tremendous in terms of balance, depth, and realism. (The harp is especially well positioned in the sound picture.) In Strauss’s early tone poem Don Juan, Graf lays out the orchestral fabric with a sure hand, ensuring that the episodic nature of the piece does not get in the way of a smooth flow. The opening and other swashbuckling moments are vivid, although the strings could be more ardent in the love music. His controlled, contoured approach is better suited to the later tone-poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), the “hero” being the great Richard Strauss himself. This is a self-aggrandizing piece of work—Edward C. Yong’s note is quite amusing about it—so no performance needs to push it further over the top than it already is. Without underplaying the various episodes, Graf opts for clarity and atmosphere over theatrics. You can’t help but admire Strauss’s music when it is so well paced. Woodwinds are tonally smooth in the marriage section, and delightfully perky in “The Hero’s Adversaries” (i.e., the critics.) The long violin solo representing Strauss’s wife Pauline is lovingly played by Co-Principal Guest Concertmaster David Coucheron, capturing the tenderness of the relationship along with the chatty and argumentative personality of the woman herself.
Surely Strauss’s tongue was in his cheek to some extent in presenting his own story in such a heightened way, particularly in using quotations from his earlier music at the conclusion? There is ironic humor in this piece; after all, Strauss is reputed to have possessed a strong sense of irony. Graf allows the orchestra to express this with subtlety, but his conducting is detailed enough for us to appreciate Ein Heldenleben solely as an abstract example of great orchestral writing. We lose very little in dismissing the programmatic associations.
I find Graf’s performance more characterful and involving than those of Sebastian Weigl in Frankfurt (OEHMS), and particularly Andris Nelsons in Leipzig (DG) which is slick but faceless. Rudolf Kempe’s potent, 54-year-old recording with the Dresden Staatskapelle (EMI/Warner) remains a touchstone, though Graf is better recorded. As for Herbert von Karajan, his idea of a hero’s life lacked even a skerrick of irony. It is easy to imagine who the real hero was in Karajan’s vision. This is an excellent release, and I hope it leads to many more from this source. Phillip Scott