Frederick Delius
»Walk to the Paradise Garden« aus »A Village Romeo and Juliet«
Edward Elgar
Cello Concerto e-minor op. 85
Richard Strauss
Suite from »Die Frau ohne Schatten« – Opera in three Acts op. 65 TrV 234
Richard Strauss
»Salomes Tanz« from »Salome« – Opera in one Act op. 54 TrV 215
- Truls Mørk violoncello
- Gürzenich-Orchester Köln
- James Gaffigan conductor
When Gustav Mahler proposed in 1905 to include on the schedule of the Vienna Court Opera “Salome” by his esteemed colleague Richard Strauss (the work had not yet been performed), the censor thwarted his idea: the work stages pure sexual pathology; public morals were threatened, not least because of the enervating, rhapsodic music. Indeed, the works of the middle-class enfant terrible also stand for a raw avowal of sensuality: voluptuous and enraptured in “Salome”, fairy-tale and exotically dazzling in the “Frau ohne Schatten”. And with artistic skill Strauss always teases a maximum of expression out of the orchestral sound – the sound he knew how to shape like no other. While Strauss was polishing “Salome”, the British composer Frederick Delius wrote his opera “A Village Romeo and Juliet”, the origin of the tone poem “Walk to the Paradise Garden”. The beguiling and splendid sound is unmistakeably inspired by Wagner’s “Tristan”, by a craving for love and a death wish. In Elgar’s cello concerto, as well, someone is recounting past happiness, the faded beauties of the romantic era, to which the horrors of the First World War put an abrupt end. It seems to speak to the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk from the bottom of the heart: he’s a singer on his instrument, and he gets an abundance of deeply personally felt facets from the rhapsodically free work.