R. Strauss - Also Sprach Zarathustra

Zarathustra, a mouthpiece for Nietzsche, took himself to the mountains, staying there for ten years in solitude. Then, one morning, he arose and addressed the Sun, seeking his blessing, as he proposes to descend once more among men to impart to them his wisdom, setting as the Sun sets and pouring out to mankind his accumulated understanding. The complex process of the tone poem takes Zarathustra from the splendor of sunrise through a rejection of those who look to the past, to longing, joys and passions. He turns from satiety and despair, in the funeral song, and finds no comfort in science. Falling as one dead, he is revived and finds joy in the dance of laughter, in which all human aspirations may be combined. Night comes and the song of the watcher, as midnight renews it's eternal enigma. The opera Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play, was first staged in Dresden in 1905 and won immediate favor, although the censors in Vienna prevented it's performance until 1918. Salome's dance, in return for which she demands from Herod the head of John the Baptist, was, as Strauss suggested, the dance of a chaste oriental princess, to be performed with the most simple and restrained gestures. His wishes have not always been respected in the theatre. Der Rosenkavalier, with a libretto by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, was completed in 1910 and staged in Dresden the following year. The drama centres on the Marschallin and her unselfish renunciation of her young lover Oktavian in a work that seems filled with bitter-sweet nostalgia, a feeling that is perceptible in the waltz sequence from the opera that Strauss arranged in 1944, to which he added further thematic development. Nevertheless the concert version must make much of it's effect in reminding us of the opera itself. The Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra has benefited considerably from the work of it's distinguished conductors. These included Vaclav Talich (1949 - 1952), Ludovit Rajter and Ladislav Slovak. The Czech conductor Libor Pesek was appointed resident conductor in 1981, and the present Principal Conductor is the Slovak musician Bystrik Rezucha. Zdenék Košler has also had a long and distinguished association with the orchestra and has conducted many of it's most successful recordings, among them the complete symphonies of Dvorak.