This new release follows
on last year’s brilliant album of Stokowski Bach transcriptions
(Naxos
8.557883) produced by the same team.
The
opening track sets the tone of the album. It will come as no
surprise that Stokowski’s view of Das Rheingold’s final
scene is gutsy and spectacular – out-Wagnering Wagner.
The conductor’s enriched brass and percussion heighten Wagner’s
colouring. The Bournemouth players must have had so much fun recording its sweep and grandeur,
and the vivid evocations of the rainbow bridge across the valley
of the Rhine. Throughout this album, they are backed
by excellent engineered sound.
Tristan was one of Stokowski’s favourite works. His expressive symphonic synthesis
accents all the lovers’ despair and ecstasy. The symphonic synthesis
consists of Wagner’s own concert version of the Prelude and
Liebestod interpolating between them the music of the
Liebesnacht from the second act; Stokowski’s intent to
create an extended seamless symphonic poem. He did not alter
Wagner’s scoring but limited his input to transferring the vocal
lines to instrumentation: cellos for Tristan and violins for
Isolde. The Liebesnacht occupies some 21 minutes of the
36½-minute whole and embraces music of the hunt nicely caught
in distant perspective and a lovely nocturnal evocation of trees
swaying gently in the sylvan woodlands underlining the lovers’
awakening and mounting passion. Serebrier invests a fragrant
and voluptuous sensuality to match the unbridled passion of
the celebrated Liebestod that follows and where its mounting
excitement is literally edge-of-the-seat stuff; little wonder
that this music is so often regarded as the sexiest in all the
classical repertoire.
In
spite of his life-long championship of the music of Wagner,
Stokowski conducted only one Wagner opera in its entirety, a
concert performance of Parsifal during Easter 1933. He
spoke of his synthesis of Act 3 thus: “I have tried to [communicate]
the idea of [the] profound perception on Parsifal’s part of
the mysteries of which the Holy Grail is a symbol and of which
the outward manifestations are, first, Parsifal’s initiation,
and then his acceptance by the Knights, and finally the acknowledgement
of him as their leader.” The synthesis excludes the Good
Friday Spell music - Wagner had already made a concert version
of it - but includes the transformation music from the conclusion
of the final moments when Parsifal heals Amfortas’s wound by
touching it with his spear. This is a spellbinding and uplifting
treatment.
From
Die Walküre comes familiar music, magnified in colour
and thrills. Need I say more!
José
Serebrier, who contributes the concise, readable and erudite
notes, was, for five years, Stokowski’s Associate Conductor
at New York’s
Carnegie Hall and was hailed by Stokowski as “the greatest master
of orchestral balance”. Serebrier’s readings are studied: meticulous
attention paid to orchestral colour, detail, perspectives, clarity,
transparency, dynamics, accents and phrasing.
Repeating
the assertion in my review of Serebrier’s recording of the Stokowski
Bach transcriptions, this album is one of the best packaged
of Naxos’s releases mostly, I suspect, because
the recording was “made possible through generous grants from
the Leopold Stokowski Society and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Endowment Trust”. In addition to Serebrier’s notes, there is
a contribution, “Stokowski and Wagner” by Edward Johnson of
the Leopold Stokowski Society, and reproductions of three letters,
dating from 1964/65, from Stokowski to Serebrier, one of which
includes this cheeky remark: “Thank you also for sending a very
pretty flute girl. More please!”
Ravishing
performances of Stokowski’s sumptuous take on Wagner. This album
will undoubtedly figure in my list of outstanding releases for
2007. Don’t miss this one.
Ian Lace
