Convinced that Renee Fleming, Susan Graham, and Barbara Bonney are the trio du jour for Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier", it was with great anticipation that I listened to this CD consisting of all Strauss songs. I am very impressed with the level of sophistication of this fantastic collaboration between Bonney and Martineau. Exquisite music making as a true partnership between piano and voice and with with sensitivity to the texts….refreshing. A fine addition to the growing discograghy that Fleming, Graham, and Bonney are gifting us!

Lovers of the Four Last Songs have come to take good recordings of the set for granted. Jessye Norman's early digital account with Kurt Masur and the Leipzigers is one of the best–powerful, sensuous, and very well recorded. Strauss may have conceived the songs with an ideal voice in mind, but he made a point of asking that Kirsten Flagstad give the first performance of the set. Since then, no comparably endowed soprano, in possession of both the tonal richness and the extraordinary amplitude that were Flagstad's, has recorded the Four Last Songs, save for Norman.

From Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin to Mahler and Bartok, European classical music has been a source of inspiration to numerous jazz musicians. The 19th Century compositions of the Strauss family are the subject of All That Strauss, which documents a New Year's 2000 concert by the Vienna Art Orchestra–one of Europe's most adventurous big bands. It is quite appropriate that this Strauss tribute concert was performed in Vienna and that the orchestra has Vienna in its name; for many classical greats have lived in Austria's largest city, including Johann and Eduard Strauss. While the Vienna Art Orchestra's love of the Strauss legacy is obvious, the band doesn't treat its compositions like museum pieces. Instead, time-honored compositions like "Donauwalzer," "Albion Polka," "Ein Morgen, ein Mittag, ein Abend in Wien" and "Lagunen Walzer" are given serious jazz makeovers, and arranger Mathias Rüegg sees to it that the orchestra takes a lot of chances with the material.

The decision to market these performances on CD in the year 2019 seems somewhat odd. While we are, of course, used to the re-release of classic performances of the past, neither this Heldenleben nor the accompanying Gregson tuba concerto merits that elevated status. Moreover, even the 21st century remastering that has been employed on this CD can presumably only achieve so much when applied to original recordings made more than thirty years ago and in the less than optimal circumstances of a live concert.

Mehta was a younger and more dynamic conductor when he led his Los Angeles orchestra in this very fine performance. His sense of balance and pacing seems just right, and he never distorts the structure of the piece. The orchestra sounds as good as any of the big names here, and the brass are phenomenal. The sound belies its 1976 provenance. Some famous conductors drive this music too hard.

Sarah Chang is certainly an exceptional player; her finely produced tone is characteristically sweet, yet she varies it most imaginatively — in the Concerto's slow movement, for instance, where she follows the changing shades of emotion in the most detailed way. The first movement may have been recorded with more strongly expressed feeling (by Boris Belkin), its finale with more mercurial displays of virtuosity (Xue-Wei), but overall Chang is the equal of any, with relaxed technical command and real feeling for the music. The accompaniment is well balanced and cleanly recorded, with distinguished solo contributions from woodwind and horns.

Johann Strauss Junior’s second operetta, Der Carneval in Rom, premiered in 1873 only one year before Die Fledermaus, and while the music is enjoyable enough, with several nice tunes, there is little in the score to presage the gorilla blockbuster soon to come. For one thing, Strauss wrote the music in the more romantic style of light opera because the work was originally scheduled to be mounted at the Vienna court opera, a place of more serious mien than the Theater an der Wien, then the home of the comic-oriented Viennese operetta.

Renée Fleming performs in a wonderful version of Der Rosenkavalier with an all star cast. Sophie Koch, Diana Damrau, Franz Hawlata, Jonas Kaufmann perform in this Decca release with the Munchner Philharmoniker and Christian Thielemann conducting. For this filming, Baden-Baden Festival Opera is re-staging the celebrated Herbert Wernicke production, already seen in Salzburg (1995) and Paris (1998) – a stylish pastiche of vast mirrors, Viennese Baroque decorations, Hollywood-esque staircases and early 20th century evening wear.

Many of Richard Strauss's compositions had their world premiere in Dresden and the composer dedicated An Alpine Symphony to the Dresden orchestra. It is apt, therefore, that this performance is given by the Staatskapelle Dresden under the direction of Christian Thielemann. The programme includes Four Last Songs, Wolfgang Rihm's Ernster Gesang and the German premiere of the last completed Strauss song: Mallows, in an orchestral version arranged specifically for Dresden by Wolfgang Rihm. The soprano in these performances, Anja Harteros, is enjoying a flourishing operatic career with recent performances at the MET, Covent Garden, La Scala, and Salzburg Festival.

Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal availability. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch’s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.