R. Strauss: Four Last Songs & Orchestral Works

Composed in 1948, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs have been called classical music’s ultimate “last word”: four radiant songs by an 84-year-old composer bidding farewell not just to a long life but to a whole era of German Romantic music. Herbert von Karajan knew Strauss personally, and so this recording of the Four Last Songs with the sweet, soaring voice of the great Austrian soprano Gundula Janowitz has a sincerity, as well as a rapturous nostalgic beauty, that makes it feel like a living link to a vanished age. It’s paired with Karajan’s searing performance of the wordless war-requiem Metamorphosen (1945) as well as the young Strauss’ tone poem Death and Transfiguration, in a performance of barnstorming grandeur and panache.