Edition Strauss (volume 7)

Album review

The music of Johann Strauss the Elder was a good candidate for one of the Naxos label's giant complete editions, for much of it has never been recorded before. Collectively it traces a period of change in which waltzes, other dances, and marches evolved into the independent showpieces we know in the music of Johann Strauss II and the other waltz kings of the nineteenth century's second half. The works of Strauss I are shorter than those of his offspring, and the orchestra is smaller, with many fewer pictorial effects. The works on this disc date from the 1830s, when the added rhythmic zing of the polka (which really remade the waltz in its wake, pushing some of the rhythmic emphasis off the downbeat) was still more than a decade in the future. But put yourself at a party in the ballroom of a newly built Viennese mansion in the 1830s and hear these works on their own terms. You'll find they do provide, in the title of one of them, Mittel gegen den Schlaf (An Antidote to Sleep), with rhythmic variety that is no less inventive than that of Strauss the Younger even if the palette of available choices is smaller. The performances here are close to ideal -- elegant and animated while keeping a certain reserve appropriate to the decorum of the so-called Biedermeier culture of the inter-revolutionary Austro-Hungarian Empire. Biedermeier, incidentally, was not a real person but a satirical fictional essayist created by a later writer intent on poking fun at the upper-middle-class milieu in which these works arose. But at some level one satirizes what one loves, and works like those on this album laid the foundation for the light music that flourished over the rest of the century. Conductor Ernst Märzendorfer, who seems to have made the transition from the budget labels of the 1970s to those of the 2000s, gets big-city sound out of the little-heralded Slovak Sinfonietta Zilina, but the sound is subpar.
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