GREAT RECORDINGS phase 15

RICHARD STRAUSS: DON JUAN · TILL EULENSPIEGEL
WALTZES (‘DER ROSENKAVALIER’) · METAMORPHOSEN
Staatskapelle Dresden
Rudolf Kempe

3 45826 2
(Angel: 3 45831 2)
Recorded 1970 & 1973
Stereo/ADD
74 minutes

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‘A magnificent account of Metamorphosen: eloquent, powerful and well controlled. Kempe’s Don Juan has splendid panache and brilliance, excellently characterised and beautifully played, and Till Eulenspiegel is a model of wit and human warmth, rich in energy and earthy good humour.’
(The Gramophone)
Award: Choc du Monde de la Musique, France

Between 1970 and 1975, a year before his untimely death, the distinguished German conductor Rudolf Kempe with the venerable Dresden Staatskapelle undertook a major recording project: the complete orchestral music (including the concertos) of Richard Strauss. The recordings were much admired on their initial LP release and have remained in the catalogue ever since.

An earlier release in the Great Recordings of the Century series featured two of these famous recordings (Ein Heldenleben and Tod und Verklärung). This second CD presents a further selection of Kempe’s exemplary Dresden performances of some of Strauss’s finest and most popular orchestral music.

The programme, which ranges across the composer’s long creative life, opens with two of his best-known orchestral showpieces, written in 1888 and 1895 and each a portrait of a legendary figure: Don Juan, the licentious Spanish nobleman, subject of plays, poems and operas, including Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Till Eulenspiegel, a peasant’s son in medieval Germany, whose pranks were immortalised in a collection of satirical tales published in the early 16th century.

Kempe’s own ingeniously constructed sequence of music (principally the waltzes) from Strauss’s best-loved opera Der Rosenkavalier (1910) leads to the final work in the programme and one of the composer’s last compositions: Metamorphosen. This deeply-felt essay for 23 solo strings was written at the end of the Second World War and perhaps reflects the composer’s sense of loss at the destruction during the conflict of so much that symbolised German art and culture.