The Bombing of Dresden, February 1945.
Sunday, December 21, 2025
Golden Hall, Musikverein, Vienna
Perhaps at Christmastime there might have been an expectation of ‘lighter’ musical fare (although that will happen on January 1 when Yannick Nézet-Séguin does the full New Year’s Day Viennese with the Philharmoniker) rather than Metamorphosen, Richard Struss’s ‘Study for Twenty-Three Solo Strings’ that comes from the end of WWII, the unwell elderly composer witnessing with horror the destruction of German culture, i.e. the bombing of Dresden and Munich by Allied forces that also took out the opera houses (that in Dresden had premiered Der Rosenkavalier in 1911). From Franz Welser-Möst and members of the Vienna Philharmonic, Metamorphosen (which includes a near-the-close reference to the ‘Funeral March’ from Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Strauss’s score inscribed “IN MEMORIAM” at this point) was given an eloquent performance of deeply-felt music, nothing exaggerated, crescendos arrived-at organically and expanded passionately – if somewhat chillingly given the complete rapport these later-generation musicians have with a piece tied to a specific time yet carrying similar significance in today’s tense/troubled World as well as being musically sublime.
Opening this Sunday-morning concert, the third (if mis-numbered) Overture for the Leonore opera that would become FIdelio, Florestan, a political prisoner rescued from captivity and tyranny by his wife disguised as a man named Fidelio. This performance was caught on the wing, atmospheric, dramatic, pulsating and charged of what is sometimes used as an entr’acte leading to the opera’s final scene, an insertion started by Mahler and taken up by Bernstein and Böhm on their notable DG recordings. The concert ended with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Welser-Möst taking a direct route with it, moving-ahead tempos, sovereign phrasing, a little too streamlined (maybe) if with a fiery Finale (including the exposition repeat) that lifted this account from the nothing-wrong-with-it to something exciting and uplifting, C-minor darkness becoming C-major light without any doubts.
As a brilliant encore at the first of their two Proms 2014 concerts in London’s Royal Albert Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst played the dashing ‘Czardas’ from Johann Strauss’s little-known opera “Ritter Pázmán.” Adam28xx