The CD booklet starts well by eulogising that ‘Iván
Fischer is founder and Music Director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
This partnership has become one of the greatest success stories in the
past 25 years of classical music. Intense international touring and
a series of acclaimed recordings for Philips Classics, later for Channel
Classics have contributed to Iván Fischer’s reputation
as one of the world’s most visionary and successful orchestra
leaders.’ Unfortunately the booklet doesn’t end so well
because it misses most of the start of the Immolation Scene in both
text and translation.
To know how good they are in this repertoire you would need to have
seen Iván Fischer and the BFO perform one of their Wagner programmes
during their very well-received tours to European cities other than
London. They have not performed a major concert of this composer’s
works in the UK since, I believe, the two nights with Petra Lang at
the Barbican in 2004; she is also his soloist on this CD. In fact Wagner
performances are often more associated with the conductor’s elder
brother, Adam, who has conducted the
Ring at Bayreuth and in
Budapest where he is involved in an annual Wagner Festival.
How many recordings of the exact same ‘bleeding chunks’
of Wagner have there been - possibly only the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’
is missing. Is there anything that makes this new release especially
important. Well, perhaps it is because it features Petra Lang’s
Brünnhilde for the first time on CD. Lang is already well known
as perhaps the best Ortrud and Kundry of her generation and though renowned
- even if only nominally now - as a
mezzo soprano, she has recently
started to perform Brünnhilde on stage. She has also recorded this
role with Marek Janowski and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in
both
Die Walküre and
Götterdämmerung and
these will be released on PentaTone as part of their forthcoming complete
Der Ring des Nibelungen. There can have been few more womanly
and warmly sung versions of the Immolation Scene. Here, a great musical
intelligence is at work allied with a voice of astonishing range. Listen
to how it goes from top to bottom during the phrase ‘des hehrsten
Helden verzehrt’ (‘in splendour and radiance on high’)
and the
Lieder-like intimacy she brings to the section ‘Alles,
alles … Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!’ (‘All things, all things
… Rest now, rest now, O God!’). In this she shows her deep
understanding of the text. In the more heroic final sections, Lang’s
feisty Brünnhilde hovers on the edge of hysteria. She is very convincing
as a transfigured woman who will willingly commit
Sati and immolate
herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Someone utters Hagen’s
desperate final ‘Zurück vom Ring!’ (‘Give back
the ring!’), the BFO’s conflagration of the gods is incandescent,
and these gripping final moments with the world being cleansed and striving
for peaceful renewal, pack quite a punch.
If this recording tries for the perfect balance between soloist and
orchestra in the ‘Immolation Scene’ and perhaps may not
always achieve it, there is no problem in their other purely orchestral
items. There listeners can wallow in the BFO’s luxuriant strings,
the burnished unforced brass and plangent woodwind. The ensemble plays
throughout with a great beauty of tone. The Prelude to
Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg is a perfect showcase for this wonderful orchestra
and their conductor’s joint Wagner credentials. It builds a joyous
head of steam that makes me eager to hear Fischer conduct the entire
work in the opera house. The ’Siegfried-Idyll’ is one of
the most ravishing I have heard and at times - even in this version
for full orchestra - it is given a diaphanous, phantasmagorical performance
that brought to mind Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s
Dream’.
The rest of the tracks on this new CD are wonderful, with the over-familiar,
excerpts from
Götterdämmerung played with no intervening
pauses. There is the traditional quick glimpse of ‘Dawn’
before Siegfried sets off, seemingly on a speed boat, down the Rhine.
Given that it is so truncated this is an irredeemable ‘bleeding
chunk’. Thankfully ‘Siegfried’s Funeral Music’
(not really ‘March’) builds to a powerful climax as Fischer
and his wonderful musicians meld the myriad motifs, including those
associated with Siegfried, the sword Nothung, and his task in the overall
scheme of things, intoned by the brass, into a musical eulogy for the
slain hero. Notwithstanding the outstanding ‘Immolation Scene’
that follows, this alone would be suitably fitting for Wagner himself
were Wagnerians honouring the 130th
anniversary of his death
rather than celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth.
This is an outstanding Wagner CD on three incomparable counts: Iván
Fischer, Budapest Festival and Petra Lang.
Jim Pritchard
Jim Pritchard’s reviews of concerts, opera and ballet can be found
at
Seen
and Heard International.
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