Bartók’s Dance-Pantomime,
The Wonderful
Mandarin is full of uncompromising and aggressively decadent music
and very modern in idiom. Its storyline is sordid and squalid in the
extreme. Three pimps in a foul backstreet room force a girl to lure
men in to be beaten up and robbed. A new victim appears. It is a Chinese
Mandarin. The girl dances seductively. The pimps rob him and then try
to kill him in so many ways but to no avail. It is only when the girl
has given herself to him that the Mandarin dies of his injuries.
Kempe’s keenly observed, energetic, detailed reading reveals the
pitiless nature and the brutal, ruthless unfeeling violence of the pimps
through unrelenting jagged dissonances and sour jazz figures; plus the
self-loathing of the girl forced to dance so provocatively to a heavy
menacing ostinato before she is moved to show pity and love to the hapless
Mandarin.
The glorious ‘sunrise’ opening of Richard Strauss’s
Also Sprach Zarathustra will always be associated with the beginning
of Kubrick’s film
2001 - A Space Odyssey. Kempe’s
opening is magnificent indeed. Strauss was not interested in attempting
to put Nietzsche’s philosophy into music but rather using it as
the basis for a musical expression of his own sentiments. Kempe’s
masterly reading of this opulent music is very much in the Late-Romantic
tradition, full of drama, expression and atmosphere. Just listen to
the sections marked ‘Of the great Longing’ and ‘Of
Joys and Passions’ for instance to appreciate the unrestrained
passion and excitement but at the same time the remarkable clarity and
transparency of his readings. The enigmatic, unresolved closing pages
of this work are given such probing luminosity here.
These recordings have been digitally re-mastered from the original SWR
tapes.
A quite frightening
Mandarin and a
Zarathustra to treasure.
Testimony to the prodigious flair of this great conductor.
Ian Lace
A quite frightening
Mandarin and a
Zarathustra to treasure.
Masterwork Index:
Also
Sprach Zarathustra
