Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Capriccio – A Conversation Piece For Music, Op. 85
Die Gräfin: Anna Tomowa-Sintow (soprano); Der Graf: Wolfgang Schöne (baritone); Flamand: Eberhard Büchner (tenor); Olivier: Franz Grundheber (baritone); La Roche: Manfred Jungwirth (bass); Clairon: Trudeliese Schmidt (mezzo-soprano); Monsieur Taupe: Anton de Ridder (tenor); Eine italienische Sängerin: Adelina Scarabelli (soprano); Ein italienischer Tenor: Pietro Ballo (tenor); Der Haushofmaeister: Lorenz Minth (bass)
Wiener Philharmoniker/Horst Stein
rec. live, 7 August, 1985, Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg, Austria
Synopsis; no libretto
Orfeo C230152 [2 CDs: 141]
Although the sound here is good analogue, first impressions are a little hazy as inevitably, this being live, the glorious sextet sounds somewhat recessed compared with studio recordings which can allow us to hear it much more distinctly. It is beautifully played, however, with verve and elegance.
Voices, too, are hardly very immediate; the Austrian Radio recording is quite spacious and reverberant as if we were sitting in the balcony, not the stalls. This production is also at least at first sight less starrily cast than most of the more celebrated recordings as per my survey, which feature some big names, whereas no one here is in the superstar category. Eberhard Büchner has a rather cloudy tenor, Manfred Jungwirth is a little rocky and while Anna Tomowa-Sintow was always a reliable singer she hardly provokes the little thrill of recognition which occurs when singers such as Gundula Janowitz or Kiri Te Kanawa open their mouths. Nonetheless they are natural and fluent singers, adept with the text and possessed of clear diction – although a non-German speaker will need to find a libretto for this wordy “conversation piece”.
I had not listened to this since I undertook the aforementioned survey six years ago and deliberately did not check what I had written about it until I had re-listened, so I was reassured to discover that my current response chimed with that previous assessment, which I quote here:
“Despite good, if slightly distant, remastered stereo sound and Stein’s wholly reliable conducting, the ensemble here, which includes Manfred Jungwirth’s characterful La Roche, is let down by the slightly charmless Madeleine of Anna Tomowa-Sintow, who has neither Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s acuity with the text nor the vocal sheen of Gundula Janowitz and in general both rather too much wobble and also too much of that constricted quality which sometimes afflicts Germanic voices in the case of several of the singers here; in fact both tenors in particular, one of whom is Italian, suffer from that. In the end, this is a decent performance that has little of the glamour of the best recordings, so cannot be a first choice.”
Thus my opinion stands; there is no compelling reason to favour this over my prime mono, stereo and digital recommendations respectively of Sawallisch, Böhm and Schirmer.
Ralph Moore
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