R. Strauss - Elektra & Salome Scenes

I was a little puzzled yesterday after listening to that Wooden Prince. Reading all those accolades for the quality of the technical recording and contrasting that with my own experience, I started to doubt my own observations. Maybe I was being overcritical? Then I listened to the recording through my headphones and, indeed, liked it better than the audition on the speakers.

I decided then to do a little comparison between two recordings with the same orchestra (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) at the same recording venue (Orchestra Hall) but realised almost 40 years apart. Boulez' Wooden Prince, taped in December 1991 and Fritz Reiner's recording of Strauss scenes from Elektra and Salome, one of the first stereophonic recordings made by RCA Victor made in 1954. Of course, the chromatic, expressionistic Strauss is at the heart of Bartok's formative musical universe. One of his piano students reminisced that

... some lessons where devoted entirely to hearing him play by memory from Richard Strauss' Salome and Zarathustra - music forbidden at that time at the Academy as devilish and corrupting! - whilst I followed it closely with a pocketscore he always carried around in his portfolio.

Just a few measures into Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils I knew I wasn't wrong in my assessment of the DGG recording. There's so much more liveliness in the Reiner tape! One hears it particularly in the strings which really shine in an unforced, natural sort of way. There's a suppleness, a wealth of microdetail in the orchestral fabric that is totally lacking in the digital recording which sounds cramped and artificial. I did the test with Ann who has not a particularly sensitive ear for audio subtleties. But she also noticed immediately that the Boulez sounded more muffled and veiled, "as if it is played under a cloth".

It's one of my favourite rants but I'm really very annoyed by developments in modern recording techniques. What is sold to us as high resolution technology or Super Audio is, in fact, a hoax. We have learned nothing since the 1950s. To the contrary we're drifting further away from good practice all the time. And when you put on a good LP it becomes all too obvious what we have lost. Nobody seems to notice or to mind. I was happy, though, to see some likeminded critics writing in Fanfare, commenting on dull and lifeless SACD productions and comparing them unfavourably with analogue recordings from the late 50s. There a few lucky exceptions, particularly on smaller labels, with ECM leading the way in producing a natural, unforced, richly layered sound with a pleasing sense of space. This is not only about sound fetishism. The nature of recorded sound does in my opinion significantly influence our ability as listeners to connect to the unfolding musical process.

As to the Strauss-Bartok connection: it seems to me both composers at that stage of their creative development were looking for ways to expand the vocabulary of tonality without lapsing into chromatic immobilism. Elektra and Salome rely heavily on tonality as a structuring, expressive element (certain characters associated to particular keys etc.). The same applies to Bartok's stage works. He once requested a theater director that in the programme notes for a forthcoming 'double bill' performance of his opera and ballet the following should be noted:

You should not overemphasize the folkloristic elements of my music;
You should stress that in these stage works, as in my other original compositions, I never employ folk melodies;
That my music is tonal throughout;
That it has nothing in common with 'objective' and 'impersonal' tendencies (therefore, it is not properly 'modern' at all!).