Mozart/Strauss - Piano Concerto No. 20/Vier letzte Lieder - Wand, Günter (conductor)

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Although in his old age perhaps too exclusively seen as a Bruckner and Schubert specialist, this universal conductor venerated Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as his musical lodestar all his life. As a conductor, he adopted as his categorical imperative Mozart's compositional principle of never writing a superfluous note but just as many as a particular piece needed. He always gave the orchestra only those signals which were really necessary, avoiding superfluous gestures and any form of showmanship. Completely modest, Wand ("I believe in composers") always saw himself as serving the music, as being obliged to render it authentically and not, like some of his fellows, to boost his own image. That was true in general for all his programmes, not only for his Mozart performances. Günter Wand's relationship with Richard Strauss was different in nature, not as general and universal as his veneration of Mozart and Schubert. It was nonetheless intense and concentrated on certain works and groups of works to which Wand had early developed great affinity. At the Cologne Opera in 1943, he (and not the principal conductor) for the first time conducted Ariadne auf Naxos at a festive event marking Richard Strauss's 75th birthday. Günter Wand particularly loved that opera, with its fine, chamber-music quality, not least because it was in that work that he later made the acquaintance of his second wife, the coloratura soprano Anita Westhoff, who made a charming Zerbinetta. That was in his first postwar season of 1945/46. He presented a new production of the opera in Cologne some years later.
Rudolf Firkusny, piano
Martina Arroyo, soprano
Hermann Baumann, horn
Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester/Günter Wand

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto No. 20 in D minor for piano and orchestra K466

Richard Strauss
Vier letzte Lieder
Concerto no. 1 in E flat major for horn and orchestra op. 11