For reasons that are not immediately clear, Asmik Grigorian’s Strauss disc comes with the title of “Laws of Solitude”, and as if in explanation the cover design includes a meaningless equation – “4 + 4 = ∞”. But for the soprano, apparently, the Four Last Songs conjure up ideas of solitude, “not an unhappy solitude, rather a journey towards infinity”. In fact her disc contains two recordings of Strauss’s final work; there’s the usual orchestral version, with Mikko Franck conducting the French radio orchestra, and then the songs with piano accompaniments (none of them Strauss’s own arrangements). Grigorian’s rationale for doubling up is that each version of the cycle requires “different colours – even if they are the same piece”.
But in fact it’s the lack of precise vocal colours and attention to verbal weight and meaning that make Grigorian’s performance of this final flowering of the German Lied tradition less than compelling. By all accounts she is a thrilling stage performer, but in these songs, all of them essentially reflective, there’s little opportunity for her to display those dramatic gifts. In the piano versions too, she does not help matters with some particularly slow tempi, so that, for instance, the second song, September, is almost two minutes longer than it is with orchestra. Occasional soaring phrases are a reminder of what Grigorian can do so compellingly, but in a work in which the competition on disc has been fierce for more than 70 years, from Lisa Della Casa to Rachel Willis Sorensen, there are just not enough of them.
Stream it on Apple Music (above) and on Spotify.
