Richard Strauss
DON JUAN
Womaniser, libertine, Romantic dreamer - Don Juan has been called a one-act play without words. He's also fascinated artists throughout history popping up in the strangest of places: in the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkeggard's Either/Or, for instance; or in Lord Byron; or Mozart; or Russian poet Aleksandr Blok's work; in French writer Albert Camus and most recently in the film Don Juan de Marco, played by Johnny Depp.
Musically speaking, Mozart's Don (Don Giovanni) is a rake and a nasty piece of work at times; whereas Strauss's Don is more questing - straight out of the world of the philosophers Kierkeggard and Friederich Nietzsche.
He's also ferociously difficult to play. The very opening - where an exuberant and impetuous Don suddenly appears out of nowhere - is vividly projected in a flash of brilliant sound bursting upwards, blazing. Prankish good humour follows this vivacity and then, prompted by solo violin, we hear the Don at his most ardent. Tranquillity dominates and an oboe evokes an amour.
Soon frenzy returns in an incredible moment for four horns - soaring, bold, noble, affirmative - this is the kind of moment Led Zeppelin used to relish.
But it doesn't last and in the end, bored by life, the Don drops his guard in a duel - we hear a violent crash in the orchestra - it is the thrust of a sword being run through him. Life ebbs away on a discordant trumpet until the basses place old pennies on his eyes.
Strauss's flair for orchestration is everywhere here, testing the capacities of the orchestra, reaching for high and low notes at the ambiguous extremes of players' ranges, and demanding stamina and breath control from the wind players in particular. During the rehearsals for the world premiere in 1889, the first horn player asked Strauss if Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the Pastoral, was really going to follow Don Juan on the programme. It was? That, replied the already exhausted first horn, remains to be seen . . . .
Bernard Clarke, RTÉ lyric fm
IF YOU LIKED DON JUAN . . .
. . . you'll probably also enjoy these concerts in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's 2007/08 season, at the National Concert Hall or broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm.
Another opportunity to hear Don Juan as well as Struass's Rosenkavalier Suite, along with Hugh Tinney in Mendelssohn's brilliant first piano concerto. To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2007/0914/nso.html
Strauss's spectacular Tod und Verklärung - Death and Transfiguration. A dying man remembers his life - his childhood innocence, his struggles and achievements -and finally receives the longed-for transfiguration 'from the infinite reaches of heaven'. Strauss himself said on his deathbed that dying was 'just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung'. To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2007/1019/nso.html
Mesmerising music from Strauss's opera Salome - the wild and frenzied Dance of the Seven Veils and the desire and pathos of the closing scenes with the great British dramatic soprano Susan Bullock. To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2008/0404/nso.html