BUDAPEST FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, IVAN FISCHER - 24507 Strauss, Josephs Legende
Product Description
Josephs-Legende (1914) In 1913, a ballet performance in the Paris resulted in fisticuffs among the audience. Their emotions had been inflamed by Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) with its ‘scenes from pagan Russia’, as portrayed by dancers of Sergei Diaghilev’s renonce Ballets Russes, with music by the Russian composer Igor Stravinski. The hectic and barbaric rhythms combined with the wild groans and barks of the music not only drove the public insane; it also occasioned chaos within the orchestra. The prime mover behind the Ballets Russes, that Parisian forum for the arts of the avant-garde, was the legendary Russian, Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929). Owing to his revolutionary behavior and modernist ideas, he had relocated his activities on the Russian artistic scene to France. In 1907, Diaghilev organized exhibitions in Paris and gave performances of Mussorgski’s opera, Boris Godunov, with Fyodor Chaliapin in the title role; 1909 marked the first combined performance of ballet and opera, with Chopin’s Les Sylphides and the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor. Diaghilev brought dancers like Karsavina, Pavlova, and Nijinski from the various imperial ballet companies, and the choreographer Fokine from Moscow (Bolshoi), and Saint Petersburg (Mariinski) to Paris.
After the First World War, the Russian base became inaccessible, but the tradition, thanks to the numerous Russian emigrés, continued to flourish. The Ballets Russes had their permanent home in Europe from 1910 onwards, with yearly seasons in Monte Carlo and Paris as well as foreign tours including London and Venice. In this way, Diaghilev promoted the ballet both as an important and avant-garde art form in itself, and also as a part of a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ together with its ‘sisters’, the visual arts, music, and literature. He engaged choreographers like Fokine, Nijinski, and Balanchine, scene designers like Bakst, Braque, Matisse, Miró, and Picasso, as well as the poets Cocteau and Kochno. For his projects, he commissioned prominent composers such as Stravinski, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Satie, Respighi, Milhaud, and Prokofiev. Not only them, but also Richard Strauss.
The Ballets Russes had been the talk of the artistic world since the Paris performances of 1909, and Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo van Hoffmannsthal saw one of their performances in Berlin in 1912. With his friend, Count Harry Kessler, Hoffmannsthal worked out a scenario for a ballet based on the old testament figure of the young Joseph and his attempted seduction by Potifar’s wife. Hoffmansthal sold his idea to Diaghilev; Richard Strauss was to compose the music, and he delivered his massive score in Berlin in February 1914. The Josephs-Legende is based on the Biblical story of Joseph, one of Jacob’s twelve sons, who was sold into slavery under the wealthy Egyptian Potifar. Potifar’s wife soon had her eye on Joseph and attempted to seduce him, but he rejected her advances. The great contrast between Mme. Potifar’s lust and the youthful Joseph’s chastity is portrayed most vividly in the music. In the end, Potifar’s wife strangles herself with a string of pearls. Hoffmannsthal and Kessler, in fact, had envisioned a mythological, spiritual drama, based on the Bible and filled with abstraction and mystery. But Strauss, notoriously repelled by anything religious, found himself less and less comfortable with this concept, the more he composed. He jettisoned most of the mythical and archaic content, and the result is a highly practical concert work which stands on its own and can be understood on its own terms because of the power of the music and the visual language of the dance. For his Josephs-Legende, Strauss called on an orchestra which was gigantic even by his own standards; particularly noteworthy is the presence of a contrabass clarinet. In particular, the lustful melodies and magical orchestral sonorities which accompany the seductive approaches of Potifar’s wife are most fascinating and compelling, evoking associations with the composer’s Salomé and Die Frau ohne Schatten.
Additional Information
| Artist | Budapest Festival Orchestra Ivan Fischer - conductor |
| Inlay | CCS SA 24507 Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Josephs Legende, Opus 63 (1914) (Plot: Harry Graf Kessler und Hugo von Hofmannsthal) Budapest Festival Orchestra - Iván Fischer, conductor complete text with all tracking codes in booklet 2] |
| Biography | Born in 1951 in Budapest, Iván Fischer initially studied piano, violin and cello. After composition studies in Budapest, he graduated from Hans Swarowsky's famous conducting class in Vienna where he also studied cello, and early music (studying and working as assistant to Nikolaus Harnoncourt). Iván Fischer's worldwide success as a conductor was launched in 1976 in London, where he won the Rupert Foundation competition. He was then invited to most British orchestras, most regularly to the BBC Symphony and to the London Symphony Orchestra with whom he conducted a world tour in 1982. His debut in the US took place with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1983. |
| Awards | Awards: |
| Quotes | De Hongaarse dirigent Ivan Fischer en zijn Boedapest Festival Orkest zoeken het avontuur. Ivan Fischer maakt er bovendien iets prachtigs van. Het uur muziek is verdeeld in zeventig korte tracks die in het boekje nader worden verklaard, zodat het verhaal op de voet te volgen is. (...) Telegraaf |
| Format | SACD stereo multichannel - hybrid disc |
| Composer | STRAUSS, Richard |
| Type | Orchestral |
| Total Length | 64:30:00 |
| Year of release | 2007 |
| Number of cd's | 1 |
| Artist | BUDAPEST FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, IVAN FISCHER |
