WAGNER: Rienzi Overture; Tristan und Isolde Prelude, Act I and Liebestod; Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I and Act III; Wesendonck Lieder; Die Meistersinger: Prelude to Act I; Die Walkuere: Rise of the Valkyries – Measha Brueggergosman, soprano/ Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Moest – DGG 477 8773, 72:17 [Distr. by Universal] ***:
Recorded in February 2010, the all-Wagner concert by Austrian maestro Franz Welser-Moest recalls the days of George Szell and his own penchant for spectacular Wagner in driven streamlined performance. Welser-Moest opens with Wagner’s first commercial success, the overture to Rienzi, Last of the Tribunes (1840), written in the manner of French grand opera. Guido Cantelli and Otto Klemperer enjoyed a happy relationship with this overture, whose opening trumpet leads into a series of pompous, martial declamations in the spirit of Spontini and Meyerbeer. I find Welser-Moest a bit stiff in the joints in the running figures, but the pomp and ceremony remain intact, the final confluence of themes bursting with the warm elan we expect from the Cleveland players.
Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman (b. 1977) joins Welser-Moest for a staple of the Wagner condensed repertory, the cycle of Wesendonck Lieder [I recently reviewed a Preiser set by Martha Moedl and Joseph Keilberth.] “Der Engel” casts an autumnal hue, understated and inward, Brueggengosman extremely tender at “es stieg auch mir ein Engel nieder,” (an angel visited me also). Her diction throughout the cycle is immaculate. “Stehe still!” always smacks of Schopenhauer and the rage against the cycle of becoming. Ironically, the call to freeze a moment of earthly bliss fulfills Faust’s pact with Mephisto, that in such rapturous ardor, Faust’s soul could be had! “Im Treibhaus” fuses the mordant chromatics of Tristan Act III with those Flowers of Evil from Baudelaire or a dark lament from Rappaccini’s daughter. “Schmerzen” generates the romantic agony and ontological paradox of an entire age, and most of Hugo Wolf. Finally, another Tristan affect in “Traeume,” with its intimations of Mahler and Richard Strauss, the oncoming Decadent movement and Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare.
Welser-Moest provides an elegant Prelude to Tristan, Act I, but its erotically yearning ferocity seems too tame and subdued compared to the likes of Knappertsbusch and Furtwaengler. Wonderful work from the French horn, harp, and strings usher in the words “Mild and Kind” of Isolde–but why not invite his guest soprano to join Welser-Moest in full characterization of this music? The merely instrumental version of the Love-Death plays as an anti-climax, and so I revert to my favorite Birgit Nilsson/Hans Knappertsbusch rendition with the Vienna Philharmonic.
The Act III Prelude from Lohengrin provides a dramatic foil to the spiritual bliss of Tristan’s death music: all aflutter with royal preparations for a wedding, the music shimmers and shakes with strings, cymbals, tympani, and trumpets. The A Major Prelude to Act I elicits that otherworldly effect that even seduced Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Few orchestras can compete with the gossamer sheen the Cleveland Orchestra possesses, though cognoscenti will continue to horde their more spacious Furtwangler, Klemperer, and Koussevitzky inscriptions.
Wagner’s self-conscious exercise in traditional counterpoint, the 1867 Prelude to Die Meistersinger, I find too glib in the phraseology–is Welser-Moest in a hurry? Where is the “lake of sorrow, the distant mirage” of which Wagner wrote when he claimed he first envisioned this marvelous music? Even the gradual buildup of woodwind timbres seems truncated and academic rather than a voluptuous outpouring of a marvelous dream. Still the Cleveland Orchestra does what is told with exemplary discipline and color. Finally, we join Colonel Kilgore for his favorite ride in triangle-wrought Technicolor, but I miss the sheer terror of those broken string chords and shrieking winds and heraldic trumpets. Too tame, Mr. Welser-Moest – despite the audience whistles and shouts.
A Cleveland reviewer of the live concert from The Plain-Dealer remarked, “The performance made one want to fly,” but I find my reactions consistently more pedestrian.
–Gary Lemco
