Testament SBT 1415, 67:30 [Distrib. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
After having heard soprano Eileen Farrell (1920-2002) on the radio, conductor Leopold Stokowski immediately invited her to record Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder with him and a pickup ensemble from members of the New York Philharmonic and the MET. Stokowski coached Farrell through each of the songs himself over a four month period, and they came to Manhattan Studio 30 December 1947 on the eve of a recording engineers’ strike. Given the lushness and haunting, slow tempos of the recording (transferred to RCA LP LM 1066), the fresh, naturally autumnal timbre Farrell brings to the Tristanesque “Im Treibhaus,” we can only remain mind-boggled that Farrell never presented Wagner on the concert stage. The “Stokowski Sound” opens “Schmerzen,” the lush basses and blaring trumpets offset by Farrell’s soaring high notes. More than one commentator has invoked the epithet “oceanic” to describe the final song, “Traume,” whose lulling harmonies in the strings and French horn and undulating rhythms hover between dark and light, aether and solid matter.
Recorded in the Eastman Theatre, Rochester, New York 9 April 1949, the excerpts from the “scherzo” of The Ring cycle became RCA’s first issued LP of their catalogue, LM 1000. Erich Leinsdorf chooses relatively tame tempi for the various, heroic leitmotifs that hurl Siegfried and Brunnhilde into each other’s arms. Veteran heldentenor Set Svanholm (1904-1964) adds his lustrous, mellow voice to the mix, the strains urging “redemptive” motifs from Die Walkuere, especially from Wotan’s Farewell. Shimmering strings, horns, tympani, and harp usher in Brunnhilde’s greeting of the sun, both the celestial sphere and Siegfried’s noble demeanor; if Farrell’s voice misses Flagstad’s or Leider’s awesome mystery, Farrell does not lack for sustaining power nor the ability to subito into a suave sotto voce. Once their duet begins, the natural sheen of her voice gains in fervor and warmth as she embraces Siegfried with her words, with none of the metallic top that Nilsson–whom Farrell conceded to be the superior Wagnerian–projected. The last scene embraces the rocking sequence that forms the basis of A Siegfreid Idyll, the assorted variants of “ewig” assuming an ever more ecstatic sensibility. The frenzy of the last four minutes of this “concert performance” more than compensate for Farrell’s lamented absence from the actual operatic stage, her soaring energy the equal of any Heldensoprano on records.
–Gary Lemco
