Christoph Maria Wagner’s oeuvre contains around fifty compositions including several large-scale works for a wide range of genres and ensembles. On this recording he reinterprets, together with the E-Mex ensemble, known works and German folk songs. His goal: “To open ears” with his radical reinterpretation. Christoph Maria Wagner studied at the Musikhochschule Koln with Krzysztof Meyer and Volker Wangenheim. Since 1995 he has been a professor there. As a conductor, he is committed above all to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has worked with numerous modern composers and several ensembles, particularly the E-MEX Ensemble. He has been pursuing the idea of “remix” compositions since 2009.

Wagner: Götterdämmerung, WWV 86d [Recorded 1949]

WAGNER (trans. Gould) Siegfried Idyll, (orig.) 1 Siegfried Idyll, (trans.) Die Meistersinger: Act I Prelude. Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey • Glenn Gould (pn, cond); Toronto SO members 1 • SONY 52650 (70:59)


I can think of no worthier nomination to Fanfare’s Classical Hall of Fame than this conductorial debut of the late, exceedingly great Glenn Gould, and also his very last recording. Gould, of course, admitted in the late 1960s to being a closet Wagnerite who often “worshipped at the shrine,” and in 1973 he set down piano transcriptions of three favorite pieces. Meistersinger was a stunner the first time I heard it, and coming off a concert with Jorge Bolet playing the Liszt transcription of Tannhäuser —and he really pounded the thing out—I was left in shocked, disappointed silence after hearing Gould’s shimmering, nuanced, hyper-contrapuntal version of Wagner’s most Baroque work. Since then I have come to admire it to no end, a brilliant conception that brings out things you will not hear in any other recording, orchestral or not. Wagner’s orchestration actually gets in the way of everything there, and Gould admitted that when he prepared to play it, it was a question of “what do I leave out this time,” as there were not enough hands, even his own long fingers, to cover all the parts. “Dawn” is just as persuasive if not as extroverted in its intricacy, and the piano sounds just wonderful.


Siegfried is matched in its slow tempo only by Gould’s orchestra reading. Here he turns this transcription into a marvelous tone poem, drawing each and every strand of meaning out of every bar, always cognizant of the overarching structure and subtle phrasing, both Gould trademarks. You can almost come to accept this piece as meant for the piano, so convincing is his reading. Siegfried for chamber orchestra, in its original guise, is given to us in one of the slowest readings on record (Gould liked to temper the tempo in many works), and one can hear the Toronto players straining to bring every ounce of intensity to Gould’s concentrated leadership. Somehow he makes it work, and as a testimony to his extraordinary talent and career, this beautifully conceived album is mandatory in any collection worthy of the name.


FANFARE: Steven E. Ritter

For the first time, the complete Beyreuth Ring from 1962 is being released on this magnificent 4-volume collection. This legendary performance is conducted by Rudolf Kempe, and features Hans Hopf as Siegfried, Gottlob Frick as Hagen, and Birgit Nilsson as Brunnhilde. Gotterdammerung is the fourth of Wagner’s four music dramas that make up his epic Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Classical Music

Wagner: Das Rheingold, WWV 86a [Recorded 1948]

Opera Explained: Wagner, R. - The Flying Dutchman

This live recording of Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Hollander was made at the 2013 Beyreuth Fetival. This performance of Wagner’s opera, which tells the story of Daland, a Norwegian sea captain who just before reaching home is blown off course by a violent storm, received glowing reviews from the press. “The excellent Mr. Youn… sings with dignity touched with anguish… Merbeth… brings a big, penetrating voice to the role… Selig is a powerhouse Daland… Bruns brings an ardent voice and impetuosity to the Steersman… Thielemann… drew pulsing, dynamic and transparent playing from the… Orchestra… the result was music making of overwhelming naturalness.” (The New York Times) “… one revels in Christian Thielemann’s masterly handling of the Overture’s tempo modifications and thereafter, the lustrous sonorities that support the singers in this single-act version of the opera.” (Gramophone) “Christian Thielemann and das Festspielorchester received the biggest cheers, and rightly so: their account- thrillingly intense and demonic, while respecting of the sweeter passages- was superlative.” (The Financial Times).

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REVIEW:

Samuel Youn as the Dutchman is firmly centred, steady as a rock, and also displays a close engagement with the text. His German is sometimes rather suspect sounding to me - with my unidiomatic command of the language - as if he mangles both vowel sounds and consonants in places, but non-German-speakers will delight in the tonal variety he produces.

Christian Thielemann intends to stamp his authority on things, with a strongly romantic performance that makes very little concession to notions of early nineteenth century style. His approach pays rich dividends throughout in illuminating details of the score in a manner that the composer would surely have approved.

– MusicWeb International

Wagner: Die Walküre, WWV 86b [Recorded 1960]

The Hamburg composer Hermann Behn (1859-1927) bore, like numerous other composers of that time, the hard fate of Wagner’s succession. After he had largely ended his compositional activities around 1883, he developed another great talent, i.e., the transference of compositional structures and the musical content of symphonic works by other composers to two pianists on two pianos. Here he broke new ground exactly at the time as the circus of excessive virtuoso opera rhapsodies of the super virtuosos collapsed. Through the use of two instruments and the development of a completely new tonal arrangement, Hermann Behn succeeded in overcoming the limits of the piano. If his arrangement of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony for two instruments turned out more or less traditional, in that the substance of the score was divided up, well-playable, between four hands, then an entirely new dimension of the rendition of symphonic music on the piano began, after Behn’s extensive studies of individual works, primarily overtures from various epochs, with the turn to Richard Wagner. The undoubtedly most extensive project ever realized in the area of transcriptions for piano, the “Fifty Symphonic Movements from Richard Wagner’s Master Dramas,” was commenced in 1914. Behn found his very personal symphonic sound already in the arrangement of the first fragments of the “Ring of the Nibelung”. To this end, he skillfully employed the doubling of chord progressions and nearly absurdly wide spans in the left hand, which could only be performed in “broken” style, i.e., by means of the rapid arpeggiation of the notes from bottom to top. In this way, an entirely intended inexactness in the congruence between the two players was inevitably produced, which – with ample use of the pedal – leads to an until then unheard-of tonal richness.

The most amazing piece that this teenager, who is reaching for the stars if not beyond, has composed – and at the age of fourteen – is his First Symphony for large orchestra entitled “Kraftwerk”. It is almost an understatement to prophecy this young man a great future. That the pianist Alexander M. Wagner is in no way inferior to the composer is proven by this recording of piano works, recorded by the sixteen-year-old in February

Siegfried is the third of the four music dramas that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen, by Richard Wagner. It premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 16 August 1876, as part of the first complete performance of The Ring cycle. Siegfried tells the coming-of-age story of the hero that Wagner has promised us at the end of Die Walküre. The most light-hearted of the four dramas, it contains genuine moments of humor. Siegfried, the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, has been raised by the dwarf Mime. However, impatient and inquisitive, he sets off on an adventure like no other. His journey through the opera traces his journey into adulthood, culminating in the meeting with our heroine, Brünnhilde, and the realization that he must cast off his reckless youth and become a man. The present release is a stage recording from the Royal Swedish Opera Stockholm made March, 1987.

Global Wagner – From Bayreuth to the World is not a biography of Richard Wagner, nor is it a musicological analysis of his work. This is a documentary dedicated solely to the world’s fascination with the man, and an exploration of the question as to how such massive hype and world-wide cult following developed around this highly controversial artist. The film is a revealing feature-length study of life with Wagner’s legacy from one Bayreuth Festival to the next, and we travel the world to meet devoted Wagnerians and those most intimately involved in commenting on and producing his work today.

The recordings here by Martha Mödl from 1955 document not only her impeccable rendering of the German, but also her singular singing status. She started out as a mezzo-soprano, but in 1949, with her first Kundry, she switched to the vocal range midway between mezzo and dramatic soprano, and in March 1952 she sang her first Brünnhilde. She was there from the very start in Neubayreuth: From 1951 to 1955, Mödl sang Kundry in all of the Parsifal performances and only began alternating with Astrid Varnay from 1956. She was also cast in the Ring from 1951, first as Gutrune and the Third Norn, and from 1953 also as Brünnhilde and in 1954 as Sieglinde as well. There, too, she alternated with Varnay, who had been performing almost without pause as Brünnhilde since 1951. Mödl sang Isolde in 1952 and 1953. To the director Wieland Wagner she was a “high dramatic soprano free of pathos”. He valued the way her “voice, personality and performance formed an absolutely inseparable whole”. Her stage presence can no longer be experienced through the recordings, but the vocal penetration of the roles can be.