page_title: New Year's Eve Concert 1992: Richard Strauss Gala
section_title: Critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: New Year's Eve Concert 1992: Richard Strauss Gala / Critical reception
caption_attribution_description: Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin at the Berliner Philharmonie
context_page_description: New Year's Eve Concert 1992: Richard Strauss Gala was a 76-minute televised event presented in Berlin's Philharmonie on 31 December 1992, in which four pieces of music by Richard Strauss were performed by the pianist Martha Argerich and the singers Kathleen Battle, Renée Fleming, Andreas Schmidt and Frederica von Stade with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Claudio Abbado. It was jointly produced by Columbia Artists Management and Germany's Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen in association with France's La Sept, Japan's NHK and the United States' PBS, and was released on CD and Laserdisc by Sony Classical Records and on DVD by Kultur Video.
context_section_description: Alan Blyth reviewed the gala on CD in Gramophone in July 1993. "I found this a distressing experience", he wrote. Even the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan could rarely have played the items selected by Claudio Abbado with such remarkable virtuosity, but "that is the trouble: the music is played for that and little else". The album presented Richard Strauss as the "vulgar" composer that his critics alleged him to be. Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel were portrayed with refulgent strings and belligerent brass that were impressive but alien to Strauss's essential musical personality. Clemens Krauss and Rudolf Kempe had found delight and humour in Strauss's pictures of this pair of rascals; Abbado had not, instead hammering his audience into a feeling of "awesome submission".
  Burleske fared better in Abbado's hands than the tone-poems. He eschewed heavy-handedness in favour of at least a modicum of gentleness, and Martha Argerich projected some mischievous wit as well as overcoming the famous difficulties of Strauss's piano writing with her equally famous technical brilliance. There were passages which she approached with a "fearsome attack" that was hyperbolic, but her cadenzas were very enjoyable.
  In the trio from Der Rosenkavalier, Abbado was "intent on ferocious power at the expense of radiance". The quality of Renée Fleming's tone promised that her Marschallin  was on the verge of becoming exceptional, but Frederica von Stade had lost the freshness with which she had formerly endowed Octavian, and Kathleen Battle seemed to find Sophie's highest notes in both the trio and the subsequent duet uncomfortably stressful. The three American ladies sang without the "inner warmth and understanding" that some of their German and Austrian predecessors had brought to their roles, but did at least deliver the trio with "accuracy and flair".
  Sony's audio engineering emphasized the excesses of Abbado's interpretations. Although the CD was described as a live recording, it provided no evidence of the presence of the Philharmonie's audience until their applause at its very end. Indeed, the listening Berliners were so unobtrusive that one could not but help wondering whether any of the music had been re-recorded after they had gone home - it was difficult to imagine Argerich's pianism failing to elicit an ovation. The notes in Sony's insert booklet, written in humorous vein as though by Strauss himself, were "both facetious and faintly offensive". In sum, the CD was "not a happy issue".
  The gala was also reviewed in Classic CD and Hi-Fi News, and was additionally  discussed in The New York Times, Tim Ashley's Richard Strauss (1999), Frithjof Hager's Claudio Abbado: die Anderen in der Stille hören (2000), Ulrich Eckhardt's Claudio Abbado: Dirigent (2003) and Matthew Rye's 1001 classical recordings you must hear before you die (2017).
caption: The Berliner Philharmonie's Großer Saal (main auditorium)
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