Wagner - Meistersinger: an orchestral tribute
RSNO / Jarvi
Chandos CHSA5092

Release date September 2011

The great musicologist Sir Donald Tovey famously criticised “listeners who profess to enjoy the bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas and served up on Wagner nights as Waldweben and Walkürenritt.” His barb of course was levelled at audiences’ atrophied attention spans and boorish disregard for the organic “wholeness” of a work. Wagner himself, however, had no such qualms in sanctioning arrangements and truncated excerpts of his works. Indeed he even excised the 3 hours of music between the Prelude and Liebestod of Tristan himself for concert use! So Dutch composer and arranger Henk de Vlieger is in good company with his splendid “Orchestral Tribute” to Meistersinger. The eleven “bleeding chunks” sliced from the opera are skilfully reformed into a cohesive symphonic whole, with de Vlieger utilising an astute replacement of voices by instrumental forces. My only quibble over the choice of extracts would be the omission of Walther’s beautiful Am Stillen Herd from Act 1, but this is a minor grievance in a seamlessly rendered synthesis. Järvi, in his fourth release of de Vlieger’s Wagner arrangements, controls this most contrapuntal of Wagner’s work with a seasoned authority - no mean feat considering its fusion of Romantic harmonic richness and Baroque contrapuntal cunning. A highlight of this has to be the Act 3 quintet where the rapturous flow of polyphony is captured to perfection. This work has already been available on a fine disc by Edo de Waart and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, but Järvi’s version perhaps pips it in terms of textural clarity and warmth, as well as a surer handling of pace. Also included on the disc are fine early Wagner overtures which betray his admiration of Beethoven and Weber.

Reviewed by James Booth