From the archives
Andrew Mcgregor lifts the lid on an epic new box set celebrating the late great conductor Mariss Jansons
Mariss Jansons once gave me a bottle of Latvian beer – he didn’t drink following his first heart attack in 1996, felled on the podium in his 50s. We might have been robbed of all his concert recordings with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and this Maris Jansons: The Edition
(BR Klassik 900200; 57 CDS, 11 SACDS, 2 DVDS) demonstrates unequivocally what an extraordinary legacy it’s become. The Beethoven cycle is from their Japanese tour in 2012, plus a beautifully shaped C major Mass at home in Munich. Jansons’s adoration of Brahms shines through every bar, especially the Fourth Symphony from his final concert with the BRSO a month before his death. The Mahler cycle is vivid and virtuosic, but it’s in the Bruckner Symphonies that the qualities of timeless beauty and exquisite control deliver the most profound rewards.
Shostakovich was close to Jansons’s heart; he studied with Mravinsky and made his home in St Petersburg, and the Fifth and Tenth Symphonies here are exceptional, emphasising symphonic coherence over emotional over-reaction. Richard Strauss was a Jansons speciality: a magnificently broad and detailed Alpine Symphony, and one of the three rehearsal CDS is a wonderful insight into Jansons’s rapport with his players, and his delight in Till Eulenspiegel’s adventures. The one opera recording here, Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame, has picked up a hatful of awards for Jansons’s thrilling exploration of its sorrowful depths. On DVD there’s the BRSO’S 60th anniversary performance of Schönberg’s Gurrelieder, the huge forces marshalled with unerring accuracy and sonic coherence.
Simon Rattle says he can still feel in the orchestra Jansons’s incredible refinement, and his unconditional dedication to the beauty of sound, which comes across clearly in these superbly engineered recordings. The last word in the set is left to Jansons himself: ‘When you get up and go to work with joy, and go home after work with joy – that’s happiness!’