Gould/Nylund/Koch/Stemme/Herlitzius/Wiener Staatsoper/Thielemann(Orfeo, three CDs)Strauss’s fairytale epic is full of magnificent detail in the hands of Christian Thielemann, while Camilla Nylund’s Empress is supple and intense
Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman Without a Shadow, may be the piece that marks out the real Richard Strauss fans from the mere admirers. To fully paid-up Straussians, his longest stage work is the summit of his achievements as an opera composer, a score of sumptuous invention married to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal of satisfying intricacy, while to non-believers it’s the most overblown and overlong of fairytale operas, a concoction of faux orientalism that’s hopelessly overloaded with symbolism. The magnificence of much of the score is undeniable, even if in the end it’s a work that after three-and-a-half hours of
music sometimes fails to repay the investment by audiences and, especially, by singers whose vocal resources are pushed to the limit by the demands Strauss makes of them.