No one, including the conductor, orchestra, and record label, is setting out to rival the great recordings of these Strauss selections. Kirill Karabits, the new music director of the Staatskapelle Weimar since 2016, has steadily risen in a career marked by solid musicianship and some flair as an interpreter. Here he’s a reliable Straussian, leading a good but not pre-eminent orchestra, recorded middling well by the engineers.

What interested me, besides the pleasure of meeting up with familiar masterpieces, is the historical perspective offered by a program that unfolds in chronological order. Macbeth (1886–88) would be considered a formed, successful work by the standards of the Lisztian tone poem, from which it gains loose organization and a good deal of bombast and rum-tum. But the miraculous breakthrough of Don Juan was in the offing, which makes Macbeth only a stepping stone. No one fully succeeds in turning the score into a silk purse, yet it isn’t entirely a pig’s ear, and Karabits, without revealing any new insights, negotiates the music nicely enough. As in the past, I don’t recognize a hint of Shakespeare’s characters in Strauss’s musical portraiture—the title could just as well be Captain Hook and the Lost Boys.

The stakes are raised in the two masterpieces on the program, Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration (both 1888–89), considering the numerous great recordings each has received. Delivering the music with sumptuous virtuosity is something the Staatskapelle Weimar simply doesn’t have to give. But Karabits knows how Don Juan should go, with brio and panache, and he leads an enjoyable reading. (Come to think of it, how many Slavic conductors have ever triumphed in Strauss, even the most distinguished?) By not aiming for thrills, Karabits may be acknowledging the limitations of his musicians, or perhaps he hears Don Juan with less swagger and more nostalgia.

By the time Strauss began Death and Transfiguration in the summer of 1888, he had completed his transition from abstract music, which held the highest prestige in the long shadow of Beethoven, to program music, which had been considered facile “Nature painting” aimed at unsophisticated listeners, although Bach and Handel stooped to it—the criticisms seem pointless to us today. Don Juan is so perfect that by comparison Death and Transfiguration seems more than a bit cloying and mawkish in tone. I don’t know of many recorded performances that evoke true dignity in the presence of death and awe at the miracle of transfiguration, but perhaps I want what isn’t there in the score. As with Don Juan, Karabits gives us a performance characterized by more reflection and calmness than usual. This renders his reading a little underplayed and inert emotionally.

Finally, there comes a bit of early incidental music, the Festmarsch in C (one of several pieces Strauss composed under the same title, including his op. 1). Being from 1884, this obscure work is out of chronological order. One hears hints of the Prelude to act I of Die Meistersinger; otherwise, Strauss composed a richly scored Prussian march of the kind usually reserved for brass band, adding a lyrical section in the middle. There’s zero indication, to my ears, of the mature composer except in the grandiosity of the Festmarsch’s conception. Pleasantly stirring while it lasts, the music leaves no lasting impression.

The market for this release is hard to fathom, but I doubt that seasoned collectors will take an interest. Karabits is doing better work in other repertoire, especially Russian music of the 20th century.

I want to be less disappointed than I am. Kirill Karabits recently hit paydirt for Onyx in Bournemouth with powerful readings of the Walton symphonies. Meanwhile, the Staatskapelle Weimar, one of the world’s oldest orchestras (it dates from 1482) not so long ago made incandescent, sonically rich Strauss CDs for Naxos with Antoni Wit. Kirill Karabits is the orchestra’s new music director. What could go wrong?
Well, for one, the recording sounds very 1960s. Compared to Naxos’s deep Weimar soundstage, Audite has delivered a thin, bass-shy sonority. The Weimar Opera House is made to sound like London’s Royal Festival Hall. That’s not a good thing. Although one manages to make out the bass drum in Strauss’s Festmarsch, it would be hard to avoid. The piece is a Strauss rarity of pre-Elgarian institutional tub-thumping, nicely delivered otherwise. But it would be hard to find supportive low tones and textures elsewhere in this release.
Strauss’s music becomes dramatically less interesting when it doesn’t have a sensual dimension. I was reminded of this almost immediately, as I listened to Macbeth blast away harshly. Karabits actually delivers a fairly sensitive performance, notable for a certain amount of rubato, but the central march doesn’t rise up on grand and noble sonic waves the way it usually does, and one comes away disappointed at the grimness. When we turn to Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration, Karabits brings us standard performances, good ones, not a foot wrong anywhere, but is simply outclassed in every bar by Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony for Reference Recordings, just to name one contemporary.
I originally reheard Honeck’s CDs to verify the missing depth of basses and percussion in this Audite release. And indeed, what a contrast! Heinz Hall makes for massively satisfying, deep and creamy Strauss sonorities. But I was ironically reminded, too, what a difference imagination makes and that mysterious quality Charles Munch used to call “fire.” I came away from the comparison scarcely recalling how Karabits conducted the music. His Don Juan didn’t leap from the balconies, and his old man suffered a rather gray tourist-class ascent to heaven.
I suppose that means this time around someone gives out the old fashioned gentleman’s “C”…

Here are two identical programs handled, similar but different. The first thing I notice about Linden and Breitman is their emphasis on early music sound. Breitman is playing a forte-piano copied by Philip Belt from a five-octave Anton Walter instrument made circa 1800. It has a good, if skinny sound. Linden is playing a 1799 cello made by Johannes Cuypers. He plays with little vibrato but an otherwise full sound. The recording was made in Clonick Hall at Oberlin Conservatory in 2013.

The concept is good. Unfortunately, the players don’t work closely together in phrasing; and Linden plays with notable lack of sensitivity and poor intonation. This is not as evident in the earlier works as in the later three sonatas that are really not worth hearing under these conditions. Breitman needs a better partner.

Coppey and Laul put forward a much more effective case for this great music. Their sound is well balanced, the recording much more satisfying. These recordings were made at a concert in Moscow. There seems very little audience noise and no applause, and the players are technically remarkable. Coppey plays a Goffriller cello from 1711. These two musicians play together as one, and their sensitivity for when to pause and how to make the most of Beethoven’s music is just as I would wish to play it myself. In a word, these are outstanding interpretations of some of the greatest cello music.

Marc Coppey was winner of the Bach Competition Leipzig back when he was 18 and has done well since. I loved his Bach Suites (Aeon 316; M/J 2004) and Don Vroon praised his Haydn and CPE Bach concertos (Audite 97716; J/A 2016). Here is another winner, up there with the best I have heard.

This is not a first recording, but it may be the best. The first recording was in 1966, righ t after the premiere—though it was written in 1937 for the 20th Anniversary of the Revolution. This is the same period as Alexander Nevsky, and the music is similar: big, bold, brassy choral pieces with some instrumental movements and small bits of speeches by Lenin. There are long choral sections with texts by Marx and Lenin. It is hard to know how complete any recording of this is, because there were also texts from and references to Stalin that were removed for the 1966 premiere. I think the original was an hour long, but you can see that this recording takes 42 minutes. I don’t see any references to Stalin in the texts (Russian, German, and English), so this must be the version of the 1966 premiere. If, like me, you really like Prokofieff ’s choral writing and film music, then you need this—certainly a brilliant recording and probably the best sounding. (Our reviewer did not like the Jarvi on Chandos because of the sound—May/June 1993.)

Richard Strauss wrote these three early tone poems when he was the Kapellmeister in Weimar, Germany from 1889 to 1894, making these performances home cooking for the Staatskapelle Weimar. That said cooking turns out to be very good is apparent right from the rousing opening outburst of Macbeth. From there the music surges forth with controlled abandon. The second theme, in the winds, supposedly is Lady Macbeth conceiving her dastardly plot and is appropriately icy. Then it becomes one big storm, effectively dramatic and well timed right down to the big pauses.

This performance presents a real challenge to the classic Rudolf Kempe recording from Dresden, with Karabits a little slower, heavier, and more dramatic than the more open and brighter Kempe. It also has a bigger bass foundation, and the Kempe is not exactly bass shy. Both are great performances, and the engineering of each fits the interpretations. Of the other Macbeths I know, Gerhard Schwarz is very exciting, though I prefer the German orchestras of Karabits and Kempe. Norman del Mar and Mark Elder are good, Elder less so, but neither is up to Karabits, Kempe, and Schwarz.

The Don Juan is slightly brighter in tone—fittingly so—but still rich, muscular, and dashing. The Death and Transfiguration reading produces the eerie and other-worldly sections very well, but where it really impresses is in its sheer power in the sections that call for it, especially near the end, where Karabits stretches out some passages to great effect. The Festival March in C was Strauss’s anniversary gift to “Die Wilde Gung’l”, the Munich orchestra he had conducted in his youth. It is a rarity but nothing special.
The music is dark, muscular, and powerful, full of energy, and built like most of this kind of German music should be, from the very bottom of the orchestra up.

The cover of the booklet is black, with a picture of Karabits and lettering in purple and white. The dominant impression emanates from the black, and that is fitting, because black is the color I associate with these performances. (The disc is purple. It should be black.) The Staatskapelle Weimar sounds like the perfect orchestra for this music. If this is the first of a Strauss tone poem project from them, the result will be formidable and could stand with the Strauss of Rudolf Kempe, Herbert von Karajan, Karl Bohm, etc. It is probably closest to Kempe, but darker and heavier. The sound emphasizes the darkness of the performance. The notes are not extensive, but they tell the basic story of the music well enough.

Although inevitably the age of the recordings accords everything a somewhat constricted aural picture, the performances blaze out with conviction and remind us what a great interpreter of Strauss Fricsay was.

The 1904 first string trio (1904) is a light, refreshing piece in the spirit of early Viennese Romanticism while the equally sunny and serenade-like second dates from 1915 (and its fugue finale was Reger's last fugue!). A big-boned, gloomy and intense work, the 37-minute piano quartet dates from the first month of World War I and has an orchestral quality which reminds us that Reger was working on the finale to his Mozart Variations. So, 83 minutes almost equally divided between “light” and “serious” Reger.

Tonmeister Simon Böckenhoff lässt die Spielfreude der quietschvergnügten Musiker hautnah spüren.

Im Hin und Her schneller Figurationen und rhythmisch-melodischer Momente vollziehen die Partner häufige Rollenwechsel, finden aber auch dialogisch zueinander.

Eine außerordentliche Aufführung gelingt hier im Studio, rasant, knackig, mit schallenden Hörnern auf dem Höhepunkt [...] Eine wunderbare Visitenkarte der Weimarer.