Although he is best known for his innovative operas and iconic music dramas, Richard Wagner maintained a keen interest in symphonic composition throughout his career. Written in his late teens and early twenties, these two symphonies stand as a tribute to Wagner's passion for his great idol Beethoven. The Symphony in C major absorbs the engertic fire and rhythmic dynamism of Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, while the Symphony in E major was alas left unfinished at its beautifully warm and lyrical Adagio cantabile.

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REVIEW:

If you enjoy the music of Mendelssohn, you will very much enjoy this CD, as it occupies much of the same musical territory. There are hints of Wagner’s reverence for Beethoven, and there is real energy and fire in parts of the writing. Performances here are clear and committed. Jun Märkl has the measure of the scores, and it is good indeed to be reminded of the depth and musical richness of the various radio orchestras found in Germany – there is no need for this Leipzig (how appropriate!) ensemble to hide its light.

– MusicWeb International

Ravishing performances of Stokowski's sumptuous take on Wagner. Don't miss it!

It would be hard to imagine a more sumptuous disc. Stokowski, in these "symphonic syntheses", enhances Wagner's already opulent orchestration with shrewdly added instrumental lines and with the vocal parts usually given to the strings. Then at times he thins the orchestration down for more transparent textures. José Serebrier conducts the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in thrilling performances, passionate in a genuinely Stokowskian manner and treated to orchestral sound of demonstration quality.

Stokowski's aim was to provide more satisfying orchestral items in concerts than the popular "bleeding chunks". So in the most ambitious item, on Tristan und Isolde, we have between the Prelude and Liebestod a rich orchestral version of the 2nd Act Love Duet. Where the end of the duet builds up to that chilling interruption from King Marke, Stokowski has it lead seamlessly into the equivalent passage in the Liebestod. It works superbly.

The selection starts excitingly with the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla and it is good to find Serebrier splendidly adding an anvil when Donner brings his hammer down. The Parsifal synthesis is limited to music from Act 3, thus ignoring the Good Friday Music. From Die Walkure comes the Magic Fire Music and, most excitingly, the Ride of the Valkyries. This is Naxos third Stokowski orchestrations disc and is the finest yet.

-- Edward Greenfield, GRAMOPHONE

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, MusicWeb International

The essential meaning of Wagner’s magnum opus ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ is wrapped up in the composer’s own lifetime pursuit of transcendent romance, with the redemption of eternal love one of the primary tenets of this and his other music dramas. Wagner’s gift for orchestral color and scenic characterization make his operas highly suited to the genre of the tone poem, and these seven tableaus evoke major scenarios in the saga, as well as providing a sense of the course and spirit of the greatest operatic drama ever written. JoAnn Falletta serves as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Virginia Symphony, and is the principal guest conductor of the Brevard Music Center of North Carolina. She has guest conducted over a hundred orchestras in North America, and many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa.

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REVIEW:

Conductor JoAnn Falletta creates a magical Forest Murmurs when Siegfried first understands the meaning of the songbird, and sends the Valkyries on a really wild ride. The sound coming out of Buffalo for the Naxos label is some of the best.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Under the dual influences of Goethe and Berlioz, Wagner wrote A Faust Overture in Paris. Years later, in 1855, he returned to the work, revising it to create an even greater sense of drama and narrative conviction. In the excerpts from his romantic opera Lohengrin we hear the visionary Prelude to Act I and the Act III Prelude, which includes the well-known Wedding March. Elsa’s Dream is sung by the internationally acclaimed soprano, Alessandra Marc. The orchestral music from Parsifal contains some of the most transcendent music Wagner ever wrote.

Includes work(s) by Richard Wagner. Conductor: Leif Segerstam.

Varujan Kojian and the Hong Kong Philharmonic made these recordings of Wagnerian rarities as long ago as January 1983, but the performances (originally issued on the Marco Polo label in 1987) still have much to commend them. In fact, only one of these works appears elsewhere; that's the Imperial March of 1871, also to be found on an EMI disc in which Caspar Richter leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Kojian, who made some memorable recordings as music director of the Utah Symphony (where he succeeded Abravanel), secures excellent playing throughout from the very able Hong Kong orchestra. Note the richly-saturated string tone at the start of the Polonia overture for example, and the virtuoso handling of the dance fragments later on.


Wagner's American Centennial March, commissioned by the city of Philadelphia in 1876, was contemporaneous with Parsifal, but any similarity ends there. The performance under Kojian is a stirring one, and this strongly Teutonic (manifestly not "American"!) work is nothing if not masterfully orchestrated. Rule Britannia, an overture composed in 1836, inevitably draws at some length on Thomas Arne's familiar tune, but its development along lines that prefigure the famous counterpoint of the Meistersinger prelude is fascinating to hear, and the piece is very well played. Lastly, there's the Imperial March, written to mark the 1871 enthronement of Wilhelm of Prussia. It's a thrillingly grandiloquent piece of Wagnerian ceremony, and like the other works collected here, effectively played by the Hong Kong Philharmonic. An essential disc for all Wagnerians--and the reissued 1983 recording now sounds a degree fresher and brighter than my copy of the first Marco Polo release.
--Michael Jameson, ClassicsToday.com

Wagner: Der Fliegende Holländer

Before his emergence as one of the greatest musical figures of the 19th century, Richard Wagner wrote a series of overtures that chart his early compositional development. The two high-octane Concert Overtures reflect his Beethovenian and Classical lineage, whereas the overture to the historical tragedy Konig Enzio reveals a greater sense of melancholy and nobility. Heroism is the key to his first opera, Die Feen, while his second, Das Liebesverbot, is saturated in beguiling Mediterranean color. Siegfried Idyll, a surprise birthday gift for his second wife, Cosima, is a tender and intimate celebration of scenes of family life. The MDR Leipzip Radio Symphony Orchestra is Germany’s oldest radio orchestra. In addition to its regular presence on the radio, television, and internet, it delights a wide public with its concerts in the area served by MDR and beyond. On a worldwide scale, the orchestra can be heard via the European Broadcasting Union, on tour, and at guest performances.

Ignatz Waghalter rose from an impoverished childhood in Poland to become conductor at the newly founded Deutsches Opernhaus in Berlin in 1912. Here, the first performance of his youthful comic opera Mandragola, attended by luminaries such as Richard Strauss, Busoni, and Humperdinck, won him huge acclaim: the Overture and Intermezzo reveal his orchestral mastery. With the rise of Nazism Waghalter left Europe for America where he strongly identified with the Afro-American cause, and began work on the New World Suite, ten short movements of rich melodic imagination that illustrate his constant desire to write approachable and lively music.

Vivian Fung’s work is influenced by Asian sources such as Balinese gamelan music. Violin Concerto soloist Kristin Lee’s shared experience of Bali with the composer resulted in an intensely lyrical and virtuoso work in which West and East collide to create music of remarkably fresh sophistication. Fung draws on John Cage’s ‘prepared’ piano techniques to create often eerie and otherworldly effects in Glimpses, ideas from which expand into the Piano Concerto. Subtitled ‘Dreamscapes’, this work explores contrasts ranging from hauntingly sustained calm to moments of brutal power.

Selections on this disc were recorded in October 1994 and January 1995.

Vivaldi' sacred music occupies a place of honour in his vast output, dovetailing passages of great tenderness and sombre beauty, rich in cantabile expressiveness, with highly operatic movements of colourful and exciting virtuosity.

Classical Music

VIVALDI: Oboe Concertos, Vol. 1

Selections recorded September to December, 1988. These performances are also included in a 5-disc set of Vivaldi concertos, Naxos 8-505013.