Joseph
Martin Kraus was almost an exact contemporary of Mozart
born only five months after Mozart on 20 June 1756. He
died a year and ten days after Mozart on 15 December
1792.
Like Haydn in Eszterháza,
Kraus’s isolation from mainstream Europe caused him to
develop along an original musical path. Some of his earlier
music sounds a little like
Stürm und Drang Haydn,
while some of the last music has a Romantic style that
makes one wish he had lived into the nineteenth century.
Then we might have seen some fireworks! Kraus had a wonderful
lyrical gift. Some of his melodies rival Mozart’s in
their seeming endlessness – something one hears several
times in the aforementioned symphonies.
The symphony discs reveal
much of Kraus’s most serious and daring music while another
of ballet music –
Fiskarena and two early
Pantomimes – suggest
that at least some of Kraus’s stage efforts were in a
somewhat lighter vein. I was very curious, then, to see
what this disc had to offer this die-hard Kraus fan.
This is the first disc
in the series not to be recorded by the Swedish Chamber
Orchestra and Petter Sundqvist, who also recorded the
Olympie Overture
which is on this CD. Here we have a chamber-sized New
Zealand Symphony Orchestra under a conductor well known
to collectors of various of Naxos’s Classical-period
recordings, Uwe Grodd.
I listened to the Violin
Concerto of 1783 several times wanting to like it more
than I did. It’s a big work – the first movement is over
400 bars long and lasts more than fifteen minutes. Something
about it made it outstay its welcome for me. I’m not
sure the thematic material and its treatment is strong
enough for so monumental a structure. The
Adagio fared
rather better to my ears but still did not display that
wonderful soaring lyrical magic that Kraus sometimes
shows us in the symphonies. The third movement is a
Rondo
Minuet. This replaces Kraus’s original fast-paced
scherzo for
reasons no one seems to be able to ascertain. It’s an
attractive enough movement but I could have done with
a few more fireworks after nearly half an hour.
There was something unsatisfactory
to my ears about the sound of soloist Takako Nishizaki.
The violin sounded too close and thin to my ears and
I wonder if the finger might be pointed at the engineer/producer
for that? Also, her intonation and tone were not always
to my liking. These factors, I am sure, affected my overall
enjoyment of the Violin Concerto which, in the end, was
something of a disappointment for me.
I was looking forward
to the incidental music to
Olympie. An absolutely
splendid rendition of the overture was on my first Kraus
disc (8.553734) and I was anxious to hear the rest of
the score written by Kraus for the 1792 production at
the Stockholm Royal Dramatic Theatre of the adaptation
of Voltaire’s play. Certainly there’s nothing much to
choose between this performance and the one by the Swedish
Chamber Orchestra on the earlier Naxos disc and the following
short wind
Marcia is delightfully pointed by the
New Zealand forces. The
Entr’actes are mostly
short and engaging pieces and the raw drama of the Overture
is never recaptured until the haunting
Postlude.
However, this is attractive and colourful music that
certainly rewarded my repeated listening.
The ballet music to
Azire is
all that remains from Kraus’s first opera for the Royal
Court in Stockholm in 1779. It would seem that the emotionally
charged music of the stage work is not reflected in these
five very short numbers which are mere interludes in
what seems to have been a very dramatic opera.
The New Zealand Symphony
Orchestra plays with apparent relish and the sound is
warm and full. However, I missed that last degree of
refinement and transparency that I always felt with the Örebro recordings on the earlier Swedish Chamber Orchestra
discs.
My slight disappointment
with this disc in no way diminishes my hunger for further
Kraus releases on Naxos and I look forward eagerly to
further issues.
Derek Warby
see also reviews by Tim
Perry and Jonathan Woolf
Takako Nishizaki
(violin) 
