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Another Festival has come and gone, the Richard Strauss Festival (and next week we shall have another, the Triennial orgy of musical jumboism known as the Handel Festival). The Strauss Festival organised by Hugo Görlitz introduced us not only to many hitherto unknown works of Strauss (unknown that is in England), but to the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, with conductor Willem Mengelberg, to whom Ein Heldenleben is justly dedicated. It is a magnificent orchestra with a very perfect ensemble and noble tone, and an extraordinarily keen understanding of Strauss’s music. The unfamiliar works of Richard Strauss played were: – Also sprach Zarathustra (twice), Don Quixote, Macbeth, Aus Italien (two movements), excerpts from Guntram, and the Burleske for piano and orchestra. »Also sprach Zarathustra« bad been performed under Manns at the Crystal Palace on 6 March 1897, the Prelude to Guntram was played once at a Promenade Concert under Henry Wood, and at a Henschel concert the two middle movements of »Aus Italien« bad been heard. This time we had the third and fourth movements played in inverse order, whereby the third »Am Strande von Sorrent« suffered not a little. The other works in the programmes were Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben (twice each), Tod und Verklärung, and Don Juan; besides songs sung by the composer’s talented wife Frau Pauline Strauss-de Ahna (who was most emphatically successful) and Ffrangcon Davies. The soloist in the Burleske was Wilhelm Backhaus, and in Guntram John Harrison, who has in a few months stepped from the weaver’s loom in Laucashire to the front rank [627] of concert tenors. The latter sang with good art and beauty of voice. Mengelberg is a conductor of great gifts and very catholic tastes, who can conduct Beethoven and Mozart with as much intimate understanding as a Strauss Tondichtung. He is original in the sense that he thinks things out for himself, not because he tries to be different to everybody else. Further acquaintance with him and his orchestra will be welcome. The net result of the Festival has been to consolidate Strauss’s position to a very marked degree. The number of his convinced adherents has increased considerably, many doubtful critics have been converted, and even those who like him least have been compelled to treat him with the respect due to a very powerful opponent, instead of dismissing him in a superior way with a sniff as a person of no importance. They realize as fully as anyone else that he is the greatest, if not the only great, living force in the music of to-day, and destined to have a permanent and prominent place in the history of music. Another result has been that concert-goers here have had for the first time an opportunity of realising how varied and how logical has been the course of Strauss’s development from the Burleske (1884) to Ein Heldenleben (1899[)]. The public support was not what it should have been, but sufficient to justify a repetition of the experiment in 1904; and the enthusiasm was enormous. Anything in the shape of criticism of works like »Also sprach Zarathustra« or »Don Quixote« or »Macbeth« if not called for, is indeed impossible in this place; though their production here has been the most important musical event of the last few years. The Amsterdam orchestra paid British music a compliment which many foreign visitors omit. They played some native works. Stanford’s Second Irish Rhapsody, op. 84, Lament for the Sous of Ossian, was originally produced in Amsterdam about a fortnight ago, and was played for the first time in England on 8 June 1903 under Mengelberg at a concert given by the American pianist (who may be discussed next month) Richard Platt. […]
