Renaud Capuçon Honors Richard Strauss

Cover of the album being discussed

At the end of last month, Deutsche Grammophon released a three-CD collection of compositions by Richard Strauss featuring performances by violinist Renaud Capuçon. This makes for a generous collection of symphonic music and chamber music, with a particularly engaging diversity in the latter category, The former will probably be known best for the recording of the Opus 40 tone poem “Ein Heldenleben,” performed on this album by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by Seiji Ozawa. However, far more intriguing was the opening selection in the collection, the Opus 8 violin concerto in D minor with the Vienna Symphony conducted by Petr Popelka.

Strauss was still a teenager when he composed this concerto, which was completed in 1882. Nevertheless, it is clear from the opening measures that Strauss was already cultivating his proclivity for broad strokes. It would also be fair to say that Strauss was already acquainted with a rich repertoire of embellishing tropes. One gets the impression that he was no stranger to past concertos and knew how to deploy those tropes to throw the genre into a new light, so to speak.

About five years later, Strauss composed his Opus 18 violin sonata; and the first CD in the collection provides an engaging opportunity for “side-by-side” listening to these early efforts. The other early work from that period is the Opus 13 piano quartet in C minor, which Capuçon performs with violist Paul Zientara, Julia Hagen on cello, and pianist Guillaume Bellom. I have to say that, while Strauss never really warmed up to chamber music, I enjoyed the opportunity to listen to these samples (which occasionally reveal what would become more familiar tropes in his orchestral repertoire).

What I find interesting about this anthology, however, is the rise of chamber music towards the end of Strauss’ career. His Opus 85 opera Capriccio, first performed in 1942, begins with a string sextet, which sets just the right mood for a work that was given the subtitle “A Conversation Piece for Music;” and, only a few years later, Strauss composed his “study for 23 solo strings” entitled “Metamorphosen.” Both of these selections provide clear evidence that Strauss’ rhetoric could be intimately understated when he wanted it to be.

I suppose what is most important about this collection is that, where the violin is concerned, there was a lot more to Strauss’ inventiveness than the egocentric preening that one finds in “Heldenleben!”