Portrait of Richard Strauss made in 1898, the year in which he composed “Don Quixote” (by Fritz Erler, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Having received notification from the Berlin Philharmonic that my free access to the Digital Concert Hall will expire after tomorrow, I figured I should make the best of the time that remains for me. While browsing the archives, I realized that I had never really been able to take advantage of an opportunity to watch Herbert von Karajan conduct a performance. It turned out that the archives included a video of Karajan conducting Richard Strauss’ Opus 35 tone poem “Don Quixote” with the cello solo (in the role of the “title character,” so to speak) taken by Mstislav Rostropovich. The video was made in January of 1975, presumably during the time of the audio recordings that were used for Rostropovich’s EMI recording of this composition.
To be fair, this video predates the more recent technical equipment that allows for more informative capture techniques. Nevertheless, this is, for the most part, the product of the work of a perceptive director and crew; and the number of occasions when the camera is not informing the viewer are few in number. Given Strauss’ rich use of orchestral resources, this means that the viewing experience is often more fruitful than one of simply listening attentively. This is particular the case where Sancho Panza is concerned, since, over the course of the music, he is embodied in a solo viola, a tenor tuba, and a bass clarinet. Sadly, only the performer of the first of these instruments (Ulrich Koch) is given any credit.
Where Karajan is concerned, however, the video record offers relatively little information. It seems as if he conducted the entire performance with his eyes closed. If this means that he carries the entire score in his head, then that makes for a significant observation. However, it also means that eye contact is never part of his conducting strategy. As a result, I came away with the hypothesis that Karajan’s contributions to how this score should be interpreted were all fixed in place during rehearsals (for which, to the best of my knowledge, no documents, video or otherwise, are available). While this may tell us something specific about his rehearsal technique, it also suggests that there is a uniform consistency to the performances that take place after those rehearsals.
That hypothesis would also explain why the camera is more interested in the ensemble than in the conductor. Indeed, for the most part, detailed views of the ensemble seem to take priority over images of Rostropovich himself. There is a tendency to favor shots of the brass section, but that tendency is consistent with the biases in Strauss’ instrumentation. About the only thing I missed visually was a shot of the wind machine during the windmill variation, which Strauss called “Der Ritt durch die Luft” (the ride through he air).
I also fear that this tone poem does not benefit that much from video partly because there is not that much to benefit from the music itself. The fact is that Strauss’ capacity to deal effectively with narrative was much more sharply honed in his earlier “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” (Opus 28). After that his tone poems tended to take on longer durational scales; and, more often than not, their capacity for delivering narrative became less effective. Nevertheless, this video of Opus 35 is an engaging “guided tour” of the full resources of the Berlin Philharmonic, which probably counts for more than any insights into Strauss, Rostropovich, or, for that matter, Karajan.
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