MET Orchestra Perform Strauss at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 17 June 2025 13:30

Written by Jack Angstreich

Soprano Elza van den Heever with Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Photo by Chris Lee

At the marvelous Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, June 12th, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb concert, the first of two in six days presented by Carnegie Hall and featuring the extraordinary MET Orchestra under the brilliant direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. 

The event, consisting entirely of music by Richard Strauss, started enchantingly with a splendid reading of the wonderful Suite from his glorious opera, Der Rosenkavalier. In a useful note on the program by Harry Haskell, he describes the Suite as “unauthorized” and says that “conductor Artur Rodziński had premiered [it] in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic in 1944.” He adds that “The published score credits Strauss as composer but fails to mention Rodziński’s presumed role as arranger.”

The terrific soprano Elza van den Heever then entered the stage to perform unforgettably a sterling selection of songs—all originally written for voice and piano and later orchestrated—beginning with one of the composer’s greatest and most popular, “Zueignung,” Op. 10, No. 1 from 1885, set to a poem by Hermann von Gilm, who also wrote the text for the third song on the program, “Allerseelen,” which is No. 8 from the same set and also one of Strauss’s most magnificent achievements in the form. Two of the songs—the second, “Wiegenlied,” Op. 41, No. 1, from 1899 and the final one, “Befreit,” Op. 39, No. 4, from 1898–have their sources in poems by a more famous author, Richard Dehmel, one of whose works inspired Arnold Schoenberg’s indelible Verklärte Nacht. (The latter of these two is referenced in Strauss’s gorgeous Ein Heldenleben that closed this concert.) The fourth song was another quite popular one, the 1894 “Cäcilie,” Op. 27, No. 2, to a text by Heinrich Hart.

Remarkable and rewarding as all this was, I found the second half of the evening even more impressive: an astonishing account of Ein Heldenleben. The composer wrote: “Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ is so little beloved of our conductors, and is on this account now only rarely performed, that to fulfill a pressing need I am composing a largish tone poem entitled Heldenleben, admittedly without a funeral march, but yet in E-flat, with lots of horns, which are always a yardstick of heroism.”

The work indeed begins heroically leading to the somewhat playful second movement, entitled “The Hero’s Adversaries,” which has caustic, scherzo-like sections largely for woodwinds. The third movement, “The Hero’s Companion,” is ludic too, even eccentric; dominated by the solo violin, it has some extremely beautiful, more lyrical, Romantic passages. The martial fourth movement, “The Hero’s Battlefield,” which opens with an offstage fanfare, is more turbulent. The annotator describes the penultimate movement, “The Hero’s Works of Peace”, as “a catalog of allusions to Strauss’s earlier tone poems and other music.” He adds, quoting Strauss:

In the final section, the composer speaks unmistakably in his own voice as the Hero, “overwhelmed with revulsion,” retires from the world, “now only wanting to live on his own reflections, desires, and the quiet, contemplative resolution of his very own personality.”

The artists deservedly were enthusiastically applauded.

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