R. Strauss & Brahms: Orchestral Works (Live)

Album review

Mariss Jansons has been relatively ill and frail since suffering from a heart attack in 1996 while conducting Puccini’s La Bohème at the Oslo Opera House. He has since suffered from several more heart attacks, forcing him to cut down on his heavy workload. Feeling back on track in the early 2000s, he accepted the position of musical director for Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, one of the best orchestras in Germany.

It is this German orchestra that pays tribute to him here with a recording of the maestro’s last concert, recorded at Carnegie Hall in New York on November 8th 2019 on tour, three weeks before Mariss Jansons passed away. It is rare that a conductor is blessed with such all-roundedness. His amazing musical skills combine with an incredibly human touch. The musicians share their love for the conductor in the tribute album’s notes, calling him a “paternal friend”. Though words aren’t quite enough to express their gratitude for working together for sixteen years, nor their admiration for his work and tireless search for technical and musical quality.

 Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms’s names are on the programme of this final concert, recorded in the unfortunately somewhat dry acoustics of the New York’s famous concert hall. The cottony recording tends to drown out timbres and dynamics, especially on the beautiful rendition of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 which feels like a long, quiet river lazily flowing through the countryside. The concert begins with four excerpts from Intermezzo that Strauss had reorganized as an orchestral suite and ends, much to the American audience’s delight, with Brahms’s Fifth Hungarian Dance which is played with elegant gusto. © François Hudry/Qobuz