The Ring: an orchestral adventure - arranged by Henk de Vlieger (1991)
Royal Swedish Orchestra/Lawrence Renes
rec. Stockholm Concert Hall, February 2013
BIS BIS-SACD-2052 [65.35]
There are many perfectly musical listeners who cannot stand Wagnerian
opera - not because of any objection to the music per se, but
because they simply don’t like the sound that heroic Wagnerian
singers make. In many cases, I am afraid, their suspicions are all too
justified. It is for this audience that Henk de Vlieger prepared his
‘orchestral adventure’ in 1991. It has already received
two recordings under Neeme Järvi on Chandos
and from Edo de Waart (who originally commissioned the arrangement)
now available as part of a three-disc set on Challenge.
BIS now join the fray, so presumably there is an audience for Wagner’s
Ring presented in this manner.
It has to be said that de Vlieger has approached his task with sympathy
and no small degree of expertise. The result is designed to be played
as a single continuous movement but without the addition of any bridging
passages or more than minimal rescoring, to leave the result as close
to pure Wagner as possible. There are one or two slightly surprising
modulations, which can leave the listener familiar with the work in
its original form with a slightly uncomfortable feeling of stepping
on a stair that isn’t there but none of these fall outside the
realm of the sort of thing that Wagner did himself. What is slightly
less satisfactory is the manner in which sections of music which would
normally come to a full close are shaded off to lead into the next piece.
This happens at the end of both Rheingold and Walküre.
It seems to disturb the listener’s expectations to no really good
purpose. Since de Vlieger does permit the music to come to a full stop
at several points, one might have wished him to allow this to happen
more often. Also less commendable is the way in which cuts are made
within the context of passages which we would expect to encounter at
full length - as in the Ride of the Valkyries, or the opening
sections of the Dawn music and the Magic Fire Music. He
also gives us rather short measure in the excerpts from Siegfried
and Walküre, where apart from the Ride we are given
none of the preludes to the individual Acts which are after all the
longest orchestral sections of those scores. Then again I suppose we
could all think of things we would have like to hear included, and de
Vlieger does include some rather unexpected passages to good effect.
What makes this disc rather special, and of interest to more than just
would-be Wagnerians who are allergic to voices, is the sheer quality
of the interpretation and orchestral playing. In the rival versions,
Järvi is undeniably somewhat brusque with the music, pushing ahead
through the score in a manner which tends to leave the impression of
one purple passage succeeding another. De Waart is somewhat more measured.
Lawrence Renes allows the music full time to breathe and expand, and
he extracts superb playing from his orchestra. They must, after all,
find this abridgement of the score - with, for example, the 5th
to 8th horns having to switch backwards and forwards between
horns and Wagner tubas with much less time than Wagner allows them in
the original operas - a rather different challenge to theatre performances.
He earns a real plus point too with his delivery of the final pages.
There, for once we are able properly to hear the counterpoint in the
bass outlining the variant of the Götterdämmerung motif
sometimes called the ‘need of the Gods’ clearly delineated
against the Valhalla motif which usually overwhelms it. However a few
bars later he blots his copybook by the insertion of a Luftpause
just before the final statement of the ‘redemption’ motif.
Wagner did not ask for this, although it is often done - by Solti
among others. Reginald
Goodall clearly shows that the music works better without it. Both
Järvi and de Waart make a short break at this point, but with Renes
it stretches out for far too long, robbing the music of momentum and
disturbing the downward progress of the bass line in the orchestra.
The sound, as one expects from BIS, is superlative. The booklet contains
a four-page essay by Stefan Johansson which not only spends two pages
justifying the idea of an orchestral ‘version’ of the Ring
but manages to describe the whole plot of the cycle without omitting
any essential detail. For newcomers to the Ring this will be
invaluable.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
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