A few days ago, this paper's Viva magazine was a "luxury issue", dwelling on statement jewellery, first-class travel and decadent desserts - all part of a lifestyle that could easily accommodate Neeme Jarvi and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's new Chandos recording of Richard Strauss' Josephslegende.
This is the perfect
CD to give your stereo a test-run and succumb to Strauss' symphonic wash, without worrying too much about how many notches are being carved on to the belt of musical history.
Josephslegende is minor Strauss but a major curiosity; a 1914 ballet devised by the composer's favourite librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and premiered by Diaghilev's Russian Ballet a year after the tumult of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
With a score demanding 58 string players, and running at just under an hour, this is the epitome of pre-World War I indulgence.
From the start, however, it had bad press. Ernest Newman, a devotee of the composer, likened it to the funeral of one's hero, dismissing the piece as "a mass of unredeemed banalities".
