Let’s just say that Christian Thielemann puts the “hell” back into Ein Heldenleben. In fact, many juicy and not very nice words came to mind on listening to this wretched pair of performances, but perhaps the simplest is the best: UGLY. Previous releases have pretty much established Thielemann as the “Great White Schlep” of his generation, his art a sloppy, boring caricature of the German “Romantic” style of conducting practiced by such great podium masters as Furtwängler and Jochum. The violence he does to Strauss puts to rest once and for all (in case you had any remaining doubts after his “worst in the history of mankind” Schumann recordings) any foolish notions regarding natural or inborn ethnic affinities to the music of one’s own country. So as not to waste any more time than necessary in viewing this particularly distressing musical corpse, we’ll move along as swiftly as possible.
The opening section of Ein Heldenleben is the most texturally confused performance that I’ve ever heard. Individual instruments–a horn here, a clarinet there–leap out from an undifferentiated mass of tone. Tempos surge and abate, dynamics swell and subside, and none of it has any noteworthy sense of focus, line, or continuity (let alone logical relationship to Strauss’ score). Take the big climax four bars before rehearsal figure 12, where the trumpets chime in much louder than the indicated forte/piano, the pinched horns barely achieve their fortissimo, and the actual moment of arrival is obliterated by a crudely overbearing timpani roll. It’s just plain bad. In the next section the hero’s enemies are aptly strident but dynamically unvaried, and the sonics put them all on the same two-dimensional plane. In fact the live recording is full of distracting performance noises wrought by microphones placed far too close to the various instruments.
Up next: the hero’s “bitch”. Don’t be shocked: I know what I heard. Rainer Honeck’s violin playing consists mostly of annoying kitsch, while Thielemann stretches out the pauses to the point where you begin to get the nightmare impression that the ordeal will never end. One possible interpretation of the revisionist scenario on offer here: the hero ignores the blowsy bimbo as much as possible, no doubt wondering what he ever could have found attractive in her so many years ago. He warns her to shut up. But she wheedles and whines until at long last the combined irritation of the sound of her voice coming from a mouth whose shocking red lips leave pinkish smears on her tobacco-stained teeth, the insipid smell of her cheap perfume, and the very sight of those overstuffed leopard-spotted spandex leotards, finally incites him to a fury of disgust and he whacks her a good one. In short, as played here, this episode has all of the charming allure of a particularly low-class domestic disturbance.
The equally dreary “love” music leads to the lamest, most underplayed battle on disc. Once again balance problems abound (where are those trumpets coming from?), and the orchestra makes heavy going of the frequent fanfares in triplet rhythm. It’s a royal snooze and it leads to nothing in particular, a dull snatch of Strauss’ not-always-greatest hits, followed by what sounds like a section that should have been called “The Hero Winds Up An Alzheimer’s Patient in a Post-Wagnerian Nursing Home”. Or let me put it to you this way: Thielemann takes more than 12 minutes to play what is arguably the weakest section of the work, when such great Straussians as Kempe and Reiner require less than 11. Indeed, at 47 minutes this is one of the slowest and certainly dullest performances around.
The “Frau” Fantasy further suffers from Thielemann’s loose hold on the musical reins. This work doesn’t play itself, particularly as Strauss deliberately limited himself to material from the opera associated with the human, as opposed to the supernatural, characters. That means acres of lovely, mellow meandering, with a bored-sounding Vienna Philharmonic reluctantly in tow. Strauss wanted “human”; Thielemann gives us “proletarian”. It is in fact rather remarkable that an orchestra that has made excellent recordings of the complete opera on multiple occasions should approach this purely symphonic arrangement with such a lack of conviction.
In truth, the Vienna Philharmonic, such a marvelous Strauss band in the opera pit, has a very spotty record with his music in the concert hall (its best efforts remain Previn’s series on Telarc). Often the orchestra lacks the lightness and rhythmic sparkle, the equality of timbral weight within and between sections, and the transparent balances that Strauss requires (and routinely gets in Berlin and Dresden). And when the conductor indulges all of its bad habits and adds a few new ones of his own, the result is what we have here–an ugly mess, exacerbated by harsh, airless live sonics. Unless you find Thielemann’s “trailer trash” approach to Strauss irresistible, I’d pass on this one.
