(++++) LIGHT, LITHE AND LIVELY

Music of the Strauss Family, Robert Stolz, Richard Heuberger, and Johannes Brahms. Philharmonic Concert Orchestra conducted by Iain Sutherland. SOMM. $18.99. 

     Precisely because of its approachability, so-called “light” music gets insufficient respect in the classical-music realm. Surely this is why the bicentennial of Johann Strauss Jr.’s 1825 birth has garnered far less celebratory and “tribute-focused” material than did the Bruckner bicentennial (2024) and the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth (2020, albeit derailed in so many ways by the COVID-19 pandemic and its depredations). Classical music is itself a niche genre nowadays, so one might think that works that would engage a larger audience would tend to be celebrated, not demeaned; but there remains a whiff of “too much popularity” around pieces that scale no heights and make few if any intense philosophical or interpretative demands of performers and listeners. 

     Yet the comparatively easy-to-come-by pleasures of “light” classical works stand the test of time every bit as well as do the impacts of the towering pieces in the Western canon, and thank goodness there are still conductors and orchestras that address “light” material with the care and attention it deserves. In the case of the music of the Strauss family (Johann Sr. and his three sons, Johann Jr., Josef and Eduard), the redoubtable New Year’s Eve concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic remain a steadfast bastion of Straussiana and of tributes to Old Vienna, the former musical center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still a European musical destination second to none. 

     But it is not only in Austria that compilations of lighter – but still elegant, well-formed, well-orchestrated and beautifully proportioned – music have advocates. In Great Britain, conductor Iain Sutherland (born 1936), a longtime proponent of “light” music of all sorts, spent decades advocating works by the Strauss family and others of similar propensities, invariably delivering performances with skill, rhythmic sensitivity, and the firm understanding that this music is as deserving of preservation and promulgation as larger and more-complex material, notwithstanding its propensities for being “easier to listen to” than more-challenging works of the same time period. 

     The new SOMM recording in which Sutherland leads the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra is a compilation of live performances from the early-to-mid-1990s, lasting a generous 78 minutes and duplicating the basic approach of Vienna’s New Year’s Eve celebration concerts by including very-well-known music as well as some that is at least a bit less often played. There are 18 works here in all, 15 of them hyper-familiar: six by Johann Strauss Jr., four by Josef Strauss, one by Johann Jr. and Josef (the inevitable Pizzicato Polka), one by Eduard Strauss, and three by Brahms (Hungarian Dances Nos. 1, 5 and 6). The remaining three, although very popular in their own right, are not quite as frequently heard: Richard Heuberger’s overture to Der Opernball and two pieces by Robert Stolz – the march Gruß aus Wien and the waltz Wiener-Café. 

     One of the distinctions of all this music is how well it stands up to repeated hearings – something not always true of more-complex works and ones written on a larger scale. Eduard Strauss’ exuberant Bahn frei! polka, complete with train whistle, never gets old, nor do the four very-well-constructed pieces by the unfortunately short-lived Josef Strauss: Plappermäulchen, Die Libelle, Jokey-Polka and Feuerfest! And the six pieces by Johann Strauss Jr. have graced innumerable concert programs, recordings and non-musical media to which they have been adapted at various times: the majestic Kaiser-Walzer, ebullient polka Éljen a Magyar!, amusing Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, sound-effects-laden Unter Donner und Blitz, the wonderful overture to the wonderful Die Fledermaus, and – capping and concluding this thoroughly delightful recording – Champagner-Polka, which not only will remind operetta fans that Die Fledermaus celebrates “King Champagne the First” but also has just the right bubbly approach (including cork-popping) for a celebratory tipple or two. 

     The key to Sutherland’s fine performances is that he takes the music seriously without ever trying to give it a serious gloss; and the orchestra, in similar vein, plays with care as well as enthusiasm and in no way makes short shrift of the elegant charm that pervades all these works. Old Vienna, as recalled through these pieces, is long, long gone, together with the empire in which it glittered, but the music continues to shine in these performances, and the works convey the joys of classical music in a manner that is not always clear in more-serious, more-somber and more-self-important material.