Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Ein Heldenleben (1898)
Don Juan (1889)
Brussels Philharmonic/Kazushi Ono
rec. live, 30 September 2023; Studio 4, Flagey, Belgium
Evil Penguin Classic EPRC0067 [68]
When, well over a century ago, the Gramophone Company of London was looking for a consumer-friendly logo for its classical recordings, it opted for a dog. Listening intently at the wide horn of a wind-up gramophone, Nipper the mutt became, for many decades, the trademark image of His Master’s Voice.
Now, in our own times, we find another recording company co-opting, in similar fashion, an animal as its logo – Evil Penguin. I have always thought of penguins as quite harmless, even rather comical birds, but maybe I’m missing something. They have, after all, featured as the malevolent, if ultimately inept, adversaries of both Batman and Wallace and Gromit. Intrigued by the recording company’s name, I checked out its website, where, under the heading Label philosophy, I found the following declaration: “Most labels are out there to acquire a standard catalogue of (some type or era of) art music, but we focus on the persons behind the record. We’re in this business to bring you the sounds, but we also want to show you the effort, the sweat, and the passion an artist invests in getting his message across. It’s so much more than merely reproducing an existing score…” As you’ll see if you click on the above link, the writer carries on in that somewhat grandiloquent vein for a few more sentences yet. Fanciful but essentially harmless guff, you might think – but, in the context of this new release, it may well be of some significance. We will revisit those words later.
My only previous encounter with the Evil Penguin label and, indeed, with the Brussels Philharmonic and its conductor Kazushi Ono, came last year when I reviewed a performance of Scriabin’s second symphony. On that occasion, my reaction was quite positive. There are, after all, comparatively few accounts of Scriabin’s second in decent, modern sound, so it would have been churlish not to welcome another well-played one.
The same team’s new Richard Strauss disc faces, however, far stiffer competition. MusicWeb’s own Masterwork index lists more than 50 accounts of Ein Heldenleben that have been reviewed here over the past three decades, as well as more than 70 of Don Juan. Meanwhile, although he has yet to make Don Juan the subject of one of his invaluable comparative surveys, my colleague Ralph Moore has considered no less than 56 recordings of Ein Heldenleben in a typically well-considered and insightful piece that’s essential reading if you’re in the market for an account of that particular Late Romantic warhorse on disc. This new Brussels Philharmonic disc is not, I’m afraid, likely to displace any existing favourite accounts of either work. Although the appended applause suggests that many concertgoers enjoyed themselves a great deal at the splendid Flagey cultural centre on that autumn Saturday night in 2023, on repeated listening it’s clear that the recorded performances fail to stand out from a crowded field.
They exhibit, nonetheless, some welcome features. In Ein Heldenleben, solo violinist Henry Raudales portrays the composer’s beloved, albeit famously cantankerous, wife Pauline as a rather more reticent, sometimes even delicately dainty, character than we frequently hear. It’s an interesting and convincing approach and his attractive and skilfully delivered account more than justifies the inclusion of Mr Raudales’s name on the disc’s front cover where it’s given equal prominence to that of the conductor. Meanwhile, the orchestra demonstrates some considerable skill, with the closely-miked woodwinds making a particularly noteworthy contribution, whether in The hero’s adversaries, The hero’s works of peace or The hero’s retirement from this world and completion. As well as capturing the winds effectively in both pieces, the recording engineers frequently produce equally winning results elsewhere, as when catching the distant trumpet fanfares particularly atmospherically at the opening of The hero at battle.
Unfortunately, the performance of Ein Heldenleben also exhibits a few other characteristics that I don’t find quite so welcome. Sometimes, for instance, passages in which one anticipates propulsive fervour are taken unusually expansively, to the extent that some listeners may find the overall effect somewhat cool and dispassionate. I would, for instance, have appreciated more excitement and tension in the work’s opening section, The hero, where it instead sounds as if this particular warrior is less interested in preparing for future challenges, whether in battle or the bedroom, than in resting on his past laurels. The second half of The hero’s works of peace also feels rather bogged down and in need of an energy boost.
I was similarly disconcerted the conductor’s inconsistent approach to giving the Brussels strings their passionate head. At certain points – including at significant moments in The hero’s companion and The hero’s retirement from this world and completion – they sound distinctly underwhelming. Of course, while Ralph Moore’s survey rightly refers to Karajan as “the ne plus ultra of Strauss conductors”, not every performance needs to emulate the swooning, lushly string-heavy approach that characterises that conductor’s recordings. On the contrary, more sober and restrained accounts can work very well when such an approach is followed consistently through; indeed, two of my favourite Ein Heldenlebens on disc – from Kurt Sanderling and Leopold Ludwig – fall into that very category. To be convincing, however, such self-effacing performances need to be all of a piece. Here, on the contrary, Mr Ono alternates between expansive, contemplative episodes and others, such as the climactic resolution of The hero at battle (6:21-7:12), where he encourages the massed Brussels strings to demonstrate both volatility and passion. Falling somewhere between two interpretative stools creates unnecessary difficulties, so that the Ein Heldenleben performance, in particular, becomes somewhat disjointed and is characterised by one or two awkward changes of gear. Sending out mixed messages ultimately neither convinces nor satisfies and this turns out to be one of those regrettable occasions where the performance as a whole has been thereby rendered less than the sum of its individual parts.
My generally lukewarm reaction to this recording has so far been based, I admit, on subjective considerations – and my own preconceived ideas about how the scores are most effectively approached. It may not, therefore, be necessarily shared by others. There is, however, another drawback to this disc that will register entirely objectively and which cannot be ignored. That is a number of extraneous and increasingly distracting sounds that occur throughout both performances.
Such instances begin to appear within just a few seconds of the start of Ein Heldenleben and pop up intermittently thereafter, most obviously during The hero at battle (1:12, 1:41, 5:46-5:47 and 7:12). Indeed, by the time that we’ve reached that particular point in the score, those interruptions have become so predictable that you just know that another will be due at about a minute or so into the upcoming The hero’s works of peace. Sure enough, in that regard at least, the performance does not disappoint (00:59). The same phenomenon is also apparent in the otherwise pretty decent performance of Don Juan – less idiosyncratically delivered than Ein Heldenleben – with the recording preserving, once again, a series of irritating sounds occurring at the score’s climactic points (10:17-10:57, for instance, or 15:21-15:38).
The unwanted sounds are often indistinct and are not always be easy to identify. However, a few clues to their possible origin begin gradually to emerge. The noises do not occur randomly but primarily at moments of musical climax; they often seem to pick out and reinforce the rhythmic pulse of the score; and in a few cases it does sound more likely than not that they originate from the mouth of a human being. Taking all that into account, I suspect – with sincerest apologies to Mr Ono if I’m wrong – that Evil Penguin’s microphones are picking up the sounds of the enthusiastic conductor urging his musicians on, which is, as we all know, a phenomenon increasingly found these days in recordings made at live concerts. While those vocal exhortations, if that’s what they are, may arguably have enhanced the drama and spectacle on that evening in the Flagey concert hall, I find them less than desirable on a recording designed to be listened to repeatedly at home.
I should point out that, in this respect, I’m no purist. I can certainly appreciate and enjoy displays of overt enthusiasm from musical performers caught on the wing in full flight during climactic moments in live performances. Some certainly reach levels of unacceptable hortatory excess, as can be seen in Leif Segerstam’s wildly eccentric performance of the finale of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade that’s been preserved on YouTube. Others are, however, arguably more excusable. I would not, for instance, want to lose the encouraging yells that Thomas Beecham directs at his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra players a minute or so before the conclusion of a very fine account of Brahms’s second symphony at the 1956 Edinburgh Festival (also to be found on YouTube). To my mind, Beecham’s vocal interventions actually enhance the performance at that point by providing us, the listeners who have invested in the trajectory of the whole performance, with a cathartic and satisfying emotional release. However, hearing vocal exhortations repeatedly and throughout a substantial piece is surely an entirely different matter. Not only does more mean less, as the saying goes, but once you have begun noticing the interruptions you find yourself concentrating not on the music itself but on waiting expectantly for the next one to come along. In the end, the issue of those unwelcome noises is enough to rule out these new accounts of Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan for me.
Why, you might well be asking at this point, hasn’t modern technical wizardry been deployed to remove those unwanted sounds? Perhaps the answer is that they are not actually unwanted. After all, we have already noted that Evil Penguin is “in this business to bring you the sounds, but… also… to show you the effort, the sweat, and the passion an artist invests in getting his message across”. Perhaps the company means that quite literally? Might it regard those repeated extraneous sounds as an aural manifestation of that very same sweaty passion in action – and hence as an integral part of the product? And might it further argue that such a non-interventionist warts-and-all approach only memorialises, after all, what we would hear in person in a live or broadcast performance?
Evil Penguin’s self-proclaimed philosophy aims, you will recall, at “so much more than merely reproducing an existing score”. In itself, we ought not to dismiss such an aspiration automatically out of hand. Unfortunately, however, the nebulous way in which it’s currently expressed makes it sound not so much a fully-fledged philosophy as simply the germ of what might be a promising idea. Ultimately I’d love to see a more precise explanation of what those words “so much more” might mean in practice. As it stands for now, I’m happy to wish the label all power to its elbow (that’s, of course, if a penguin actually has one). On this occasion at least, however, I can’t help feeling that it would have been a better course of action to have “reproduc[ed] an existing score” without the inclusion of those supplementary vocal ad libs. For me, at least, it would have provided an altogether better listening experience.
Rob Maynard
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