Strauss Waltzes and Polkas – Jos van Immerseel

Somewhere around 1900, Mahler was said to have paid Johann Strauss the compliment of predicting that the waltzes would outlast most of the symphonies being written in Vienna at the time. It was not entirely a joke, and this new disc from Jos van Immerseel and Anima Eterna Brugge makes the case for taking that prediction seriously — again.

I confess to walking in skeptical. Period-instrument Strauss sounds, on paper, like a stunt — gut strings sawing away at “The Blue Danube,” some scholarly point being scored at the expense of the pleasure principle. That is not what happens here. The reduced body of strings, the narrower vibrato, the woodwinds that snap into focus rather than swim in a bath of reverberant Musikverein glow — all of it strips away the fondant. What’s left is leaner, wirier, occasionally even a little astringent. And it is, more often than not, a revelation.

Take the Die Fledermaus overture. Most conductors treat it as a kind of hors d’oeuvre, tossed off with a wink before the champagne really starts flowing. Immerseel finds structure in it — actual sonata-adjacent shape, phrases that breathe and land with rhythmic point rather than melting into each other. The csárdás gets an even more striking treatment: that famous introduction, often played as generic gypsy-flavored filler, here has real bite, the cimbalom-like color from the pizzicato strings and the reedy, slightly nasal winds suggesting an actual Hungarian tavern rather than a Habsburg approximation of one. It made me sit up.

Immerseel’s tempo choices throughout tend toward the brisk and unsentimental — no wallowing, no swooning rubato smeared across every downbeat of the waltz’s second beat, that anticipatory Viennese lilt some conductors turn into a full-blown limp. The “Frühlingsstimmen” waltz, one of the loveliest and most fragile things Strauss ever wrote, moves here with real spring in its step, airy rather than perfumed. Some will miss the schmaltz. I did not, particularly, though there were a few bars in the “Nordseebilder” waltz — that lesser-known, oddly programmatic essay in seascape — where I wanted just a touch more indulgence, more of that expressive give that lets a phrase settle before moving on. Immerseel’s discipline can occasionally read as brusqueness.

The polkas fare wonderfully. “Tritsch-Tratsch” clatters by with real wit, string articulation crisp as a snapped twig, and the “Neue Pizzicato-Polka” is a small marvel of chamber-scaled precision — you hear every pluck as an individual gesture rather than a blurred wash. “Furioso Polka, Quasi Galopp” lives up to its title without turning into mere noise, which is harder to bring off than it sounds; galops are notoriously easy to wreck by rushing.

The two overtures — Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeuner­baron — remind you that Strauss, at his best, was writing genuinely accomplished theater music, sophisticated in its handling of thematic recall and orchestral color, not merely a tune-stringer. Brahms admired him without irony; Schoenberg arranged his waltzes for chamber ensemble as a mark of real esteem, not condescension. This disc seems to understand that history better than most “authentic” Strauss discs I’ve encountered, which usually reduce period-instrument practice to a gimmick rather than a genuine interpretive argument.

The “Egyptischer Marsch” is a particular pleasure — exotic without kitsch, its chromatic writhing given proper weight, the tam-tam and lower brass allowed real menace rather than cartoon color. And the “Kaiser-Walzer” absence aside — one could quibble endlessly about programming on a disc like this — the “Blue Danube” that closes matters is unhurried, spacious, monumental almost, without ever curdling into the bloated grandiosity so many big-orchestra versions inflict on it.

Sound is clean, close, unglamorous — you hear rosin, breath, the occasional creak of a chair. Not luxurious. Honest.

Does this replace Willi Boskovsky, or Carlos Kleiber’s classic New Year’s outings, or even Herbert von Karajan’s more sumptuous Decca sessions? No — those recordings occupy a different aesthetic universe entirely, and there’s room in one’s collection for both. But as a corrective, as an argument that Strauss deserves better than nostalgia and whipped cream, this disc succeeds admirably. Recommended, with real enthusiasm, to anyone who thought they already knew this music cold.