But the central gesture is clear enough that subsequent variations on the pattern keep the piece feeling unified. “Nodding Yellow” opens with lines for cello that ascend unpredictably. The five works on “Belladonna” contain through-composed parts for the Mivos Quartet - a group that has also excelled in the music of the jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire - and show Halvorson’s keen ear for the slightly bent earworm. (“I like being able to operate in the in-between areas,” she told a recent interviewer.) But with an album of string quartet music as strong as this one, she is worthy of as much renown in the classical field as she holds in the jazz community. Like her teacher Anthony Braxton, the composer and improvising guitarist Mary Halvorson would rather not talk about genre categories. Yet it’s not a view that does the composer much justice. It’s plainly Nelsons’s mature view on Strauss, and fair enough. Try the sunset of “An Alpine Symphony,” or the fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” or “Don Juan” - here more of a Falstaff, but without the jokes. The new ones are flabbier, slacker, with long periods of strangely self-regarding, even aimless conducting.
He recorded many of these works about a decade ago with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and those accounts were full of bite and tension and drama. The sheer mass and detailing of sound he marshals is stunning and often hard to resist, although it is sad to hear two orchestras that once had strikingly different timbres seeming now all but indistinguishable (aside from a smudge of darkness in the superior Leipzig strings and a piercing glare in the Boston brass).īut the kinds of conductors Nelsons is sometimes imagined as a successor to - Herbert von Karajan, say, or Rudolf Kempe - knew that there was more to Strauss than mere opulence. Far from it: If you think of Strauss only as a composer to luxuriate in, Nelsons is your man. That’s not to say that the set is unpleasant. Sadly, these seven discs don’t amount to much, either - interpretively, at least. This anthology of Strauss’s orchestral works is the first evidence on record of the much-ballyhooed alliance that Andris Nelsons set up between his Boston and Leipzig orchestras, an innovative approach to overwork that hasn’t amounted to much in the concert hall.