Richard Strauss - - Josephslegende [Hybrid SACD]

"Jossephslegende" in my lifetime has gone from an obscure ballet suite recorded by Gerry Schwartz and the Seattle SO to a more complete rendition of the score by (possibly) Hiroshi Wakasugi and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. These performances seemed mostly for Strauss completists as the music was obviously from the "bottom of the drawer."

But then in 1999 Giuseppe Sinopoli led the Staatskapelle Orchestra of Dresden in a live performance of the complete ballet. It was released by DG, and frankly, it was a revelation. Sinopoli and the orchestra revealed a richness and power that one scarcely imagined was present in the music. Suddenly, "Josephs Legende" was more than just a musical curiosity - it was a fascinating musical statement.

And now, believe it or not, Ivan Fischer and his Budspest Festival Orchestra have issued on the Channel Classics label - in spectacular SACD sound - another performance of the music which is so revelatory that for all of the expertise shown earlier by Sinopoli and his players, we are reminded as never before that this is a BALLET - and what a ballet! Fischer reveals beauty and rhythms scarcely imagined before. What was impressive is now meaningful, and what was exciting is now magnificent.

NO LOVER OF LATE ROMANTIC MUSIC SHOULD PASS THIS BUY. - IT IS AN IMPERATIVE ACQUISITION. GET IT NOW. THERE'LL NEVER BE ANYTHING LIKE IT.

It's probably good to have this new recording of Strauss's little-known and seldom-performed ballet "Josephs Legende." Completists will already have rushed to acquire their copy; it's an excellent recorded performance. The rest of us may want to exercise caution.

Put simply, "Josephs Legende" is not first-rate Strauss. It falls more into the category of curiousities or "interesting" works. You'll gain a greater sense, perhaps, of the milieu in which the composer functioned, of his creative strengths and weaknesses, of the cultural forces that caused this work's creation and then swept it under the rug for eighty years. Maybe you'll hear "Salome" or "Ariadne" with new insight. But you're never going to plan your summer vacation around a performance somewhere of "Josephs Legende."

Perhaps increased insight should be reward enough. Some of those connected with this project have laid on way too many inappropriate superlatives. Start with conductor Iván Fischer's breathless note in the CD booklet: "Maybe if Nijinsky would have danced the part of the beautiful, attractive Joseph the world would now consider this work as one of Strauss' greatest masterpieces." No, sorry. The storyline would still be laden with exoticism, misogyny, and homoeroticism, ending in an apotheosis portrayed so vaguely as to be confusing rather than transformative. Years later, Britten would do this kind of thing with much greater skill, taste, and an actual moral sense.

By 1914 Strauss had abandoned the mercurial and protean style of his late-Romantic tone poems and early operas, in favor of a more measured, neoclassical presentation. So here we have many, many periodic (i.e., regular, symmetrical, and repeated or parallel) phrases and often a rather restrained, diatonic lyricism. He may have been searching for a more modernistic style, but the effect here is (as his biographer Michael Kennedy put it) that of "high-quality film music."

Clemens Romijn's essay in the CD booklet suggests that since the feverish climate of the Ballets Russes had just produced Stravinsky's "Rite," Strauss' "Legende" breathed the same fetid/fervid air, and that in creating it Strauss hoped to regain his position in the European avant-garde. Both notions are simply untrue. Strauss was suckered by Hoffmansthal into composing this work and voiced continual discomfort and boredom with the task in spite of the huge fee Diaghilev had promised him. His lack of empathy with the central character is quite obvious in the unpersuasive climax of the ballet (in which Joseph is sprung from his chains, following Potiphar's wife's attempt to seduce him, and with an attending angel floats into the wings).

There is some good music here. But it is offset by an awful lot of workmanlike plodding. If you don't have the scenario in front of you, helpfully included in the CD booklet, it's going to seem deadly dull for long patches. One does begin to appreciate the relative brevity of the tone poems.

I gave the music two stars and the performance and recording four. Maybe you'll get it anyway, and maybe you should. Just don't expect to be carried away unless you are unusually susceptible to Divine Decadence, and unusually patient as well.