Weber: Der Freischütz ~ C. Kleiber
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Free Music Notes for Weber: Der Freischütz ~ C. Kleiber
Free Music Review: Great Weber!
Hit: 5 Stars
This is the first record of Kleiber.Maybe the best opera record in the world!!!Bravo!Free Music Review: Not, in fact, the best. However, it is good.
Hit: 4 Stars
Despite many of the other reviews saying that this is the one you MUST purchase, it doesn't really live up to the hype. First of all, Gundula Janowitz didn't do the part of Agathe justice in my opinion. Her voice is thin, has virtually no tonal depth and she sounds shrill on her high notes (and the sped up, forced vibrato on said high notes makes it painful). And in the very few moving, coloratura-ish parts she can't handle it. It all becomes one blob of sound.
Second, I strongly dislike Peter Schreier as Max. Someone else said that he's an acquired taste, and I most certainly agree. His vibrato is wide, often wobbly and his voice is tragically thin. I'm not just exaggerating when I say that when I first heard his voice in this opera I cringed a little. It's certainly not for everyone.
The recording's saving grace, for me, is Edith Mathis' Ännchen and Theo Adam's Kaspar. Mathis' voice is beautiful and has just the right amount of weight for the part (for my taste) and she handles the moving passages effortlessly--far better than Janowitz. Adam's Kaspar is menacing and dark, and he handles the moving, coloratura-ish parts possibly even better than a soprano could (particularly in the aria where Kaspar sings 'Triumph' a whole bunch of times).
Buy it if you want to hear a perfect Ännchen and Kaspar, but otherwise, go with Grümmer's "Freischütz".
Free Music Review: Expectations too high
Hit: 4 Stars
Having read the great reviews and loving the opera, I bought this recording with great anticipation. My reaction after listening was mixed. The positives have been described by others. And there are many moments that are absolutely dazzling. What bothered me was the way Kleiber seems to conducting almost frantically. For instance, the Waltz (which you can listen to on the sample) is played at a breakneck speed. It didn't conjure in my mind townspeople dancing into the tavern. The pacing made me think Kleiber was being almost dismissive of the music. At the start of the wolf's glen scene, the ghosts don't seem spooky, they seem shrill. I would encourage people to be wary when recordings are "anointed" as this one seems to have been. I couldn't argue with someone calling this recording "brilliant," but its idiosyncracies would make me unwilling to describe it as "definitive."Free Music Review: Es ist gut...
Hit: 4 Stars
The whole opera is well done, but I felt that Agatha's arias could have been a little faster. The end of "Leise, Leise" lacked excitement.Free Music Review: A safe choice for a recording of "Der Freischutz"
Hit: 3 Stars
SOURCE:
1973 studio recording made at VEB Deutsche Schallplaten, Berlin (in what was then very carefully designated as the DDR or German Democratic Republic.)
SOUND:
Good 1970s Deutsche Grammophon stereo.
SINGING CAST:
AGATHE - Gundula Janowitz
ANNCHEN - Edith Mathis
MAX - Peter Schreier
KASPAR - Theo Adam
OTTOKAR - Bernd Weikl
KUNO - Siegfried Vogel
HERMIT - Franz Crass
KILIAN - Gunther Leib
FIRST BRIDESMAID - Renate Hoff
SECOND BRIDESMAID - Brigitte Pfretzschner
THIRD BRIDESMAID - Renate Krahmer
FOURTH BRIDESMAID Bridesmaid - Ingeborg Springer.
DIALOGUE CAST:
Agathe - Regine Jeske
Annchen - Ingrid Hille
Max - Hans Jorn Weber
Kaspar / Samiel - Gerhard Paul
Ottokar - Otto Mellies
Kuno - Gerd Biewer
Hermit - Franz Crass
Kilian - Günther Leib
Royal Huntsman - Friedrich Wilhelm Junge
Royal Bodyguard - Achim Schmidtchen
Gamekeeper - August Hutten.
CONDUCTOR:
Carlos Kleiber with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Rundfunkchor Leipzig.
COMMENTARY:
Reading Amazon reviews can sometimes be quite revelatory. In this case, before one listens to a single bar of the performance it is clear that there is something odd about the conducting. There is an air of protesting too much about the praise accorded to it. On the other hand, the singers seem to have attracted relatively little comment--potentially an ominous portent for an opera.
Well, on listening to the opera, I find that the singers aren't worth much in the way of comment. Janowitz and Adam are the best of the bunch and, truth to tell, that isn't particularly high praise. Peter Schreier is one of those acquired tastes that I have no intention of acquiring. He's not bad, not really, but who would go out of their way to hear him? He makes the egregious Hans Hopf on the old recordings conducted by Furtwangler and Erich Kleiber sound positively ... musical by comparison. The rest of the singing cast is appropriately competent, neither more nor less.
I specifically mention the singing cast because this is one of those lame productions in which some fool of a producer has decided that singers are incapable of speaking. Voice actors do the dialogue passages, a practice that virtually guarantees disaster, for the voices of the actors never match those of the singers and because such actors invariably overdo it by performing in what they fondly imagine to be an operatic style. Such casting costs this recording one star, all by itself. And the casting of a single voice actor to hold conversations with himself as Kaspar AND Samiel is simply perverse!
This, we are informed, is Kleiber Minor's first big-time recording, and it shows it. There are passages which are indisputably very good. There are passages which are just plain strange. What there unquestionably is not is a self-consistent and convincing vision of what "Der Freischutz" is all about, the sort of thing that is so clear in the ultra-Romantic version of Wilhelm Furtwängler and in the more restrained but equally brilliant version conducted by Carlos Kleiber's father, Erich. The elder Kleiber's "Freischutz" had been broadcast in 1955. It must have been one of the older man's last major projects before his sudden death in January 1956. Carlos Kleiber must have been familiar with his father's version of the opera, leading me to speculate that at least some of the peculiarities of this recording owe their existence to generational rivalry between father and son.
"Der Freischutz" is a far better opera than its current spotty performance frequency in North America might suggest. It has a fine overture that is followed by a slightly ponderous, scenario-establishing first scene. The opera truly takes off in the vocally spectacular second scene of Act I. If two really first class sopranos from the German school of singing are present, the sequence of solos and duets make it is as good as anything written anywhere by anybody. Janowitz and Mathis are good but not great, making this scene less than it might be.
The heart of the opera is the ensuing Wolf's Glen scene. Here, Weber pulled out all the stops to create the first Romantic opera. A very young Richard Wagner was bowled over by this opera. It set him on his chosen career. And we all know where that led....
The Wolf's Glen scene is jolly good fun, brilliantly constructed and it certainly had enormous impact on audiences for decades after its premiere in 1821. Its lineal descendants include Fafner's den in "Siegfried," both "Salome" and Elektra," "Wozzeck" and the musical scores of every other horror movie made in Hollywood or anywhere else. That being the case, it strikes me that the Amazon reviewers who inform us "that after 200 years the Wolf's Glen scene can still make a person shudder" and of "the really terrific sense of eerie menace" are being a bit hyperbolic.
For the opera as a whole, I find myself more in agreement with this comment from the discerning Amazon reviewer, Sean Coxen: "If a record collector were to purchase only one 'Freischutz' for his library, this would be a safe enough choice". A safe choice, for the sound is (more or less) modern and the singers are (more or less) acceptable. Yes, quite safe. If, however, someone out there is looking for a GREAT performance, not just a safe one, I suggest grabbing a copy of either the Furtwängler version or the Erich Kleiber. They're both cheap and they're both excellent, so buy both!
A COMMENT ON CASTING:
An earlier reviewer rhetorically asked where a perfect Agathe is to be found. There is a simple answer to that: Elizabeth Grummer. She was a gloriously shining star of the post-WWII era, equally brilliant as Donna Anna in "Don Giovanni" and Eva in "Die Meistersinger." As Agathe for both Furtwangler and Kleiber, she was wonderful--there is no other word for it.
A COMMENT ON IMAGERY:
A complaint from an Amazon reviewer about the most recent published state of this recording, "Even the excellent (menacing!) cover art is placed askew", leads me to ask this: Can't anybody see that the cover shows a side-by-side shotgun? This is an opera about riflemen, for Pete's sake. The most famous scene in the opera involves casting seven magic rifle bullets! So, why the shotgun?