Endnotes, November-December 2025
In this edition: Siegfried Wagner conducts his father’s music * Sir Adrian Boult conducts Berg and Vaughan Williams * A Miracle in the Gorbals * Clare Hammond plays 20th-century British music
Not content with bringing devoted listeners of the late-romantic repertoire vintage Bruckner, SOMM has now come forward with what can only be described as a masterpiece of musical time-travel: a two-CD set of Wagner’s music, recorded in the 1920s, and conducted by his son, Siegfried. We have all listened to the famous Siegfried Idyll – that enchanting Christmas serenade by Wagner to his wife and baby son (the work’s dedicatee, born in 1869) – so it is hugely exciting to find a real, tangible contact with that Wagnerian past, in the form of this audio-restored, cleaned-up and curated collection presented by sound-engineer, Lani Spahr, and producer, Siva Oke.
The discography, marshalled for the CD, comes from the earliest time of electrical recordings – from Parlophone, Columbia and HMV – so the listener will hear Berlin State, Bayreuth and London Symphony Orchestra players, clustered around the primitive equipment of the time, in what will seem to us in the digital age, a dry, even crackly sound-world. Yet such thoughts soon dissolve, as you concentrate on the musicianship, the slowly-unfolding and undemonstrative interpretations under Siegfried’s baton – in short, the type of Wagner performance of a century ago, and longer.
The disc begins with the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla from Das Rheingold, the first opera in The Ring cycle; then, The Ride of the Valkyries and Magic Fire Music from Die Walkure. The Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s last opera, the mystical Parsifal makes an appearance, too; with the second CD opening with the Siegfried Idyll. As Robert Matthew-Walker comments in the CD booklet (quoting George Bernard Shaw): “Siegfried Wagner did not take command of the army, like Hans Richter… but simply gave the orchestra plenty of time… It was a joy to see how he got the very best out of his players.” And that is precisely the feeling that emanates from this collection: Wagner that grows on you, that seems to take longer, lingering in the mind after the works have ended.
Extracts from Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, the monumental Prelude to Act 1 and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde(orchestral version) take us through to the CD’s finale, Siegfried Wagner’s very own opera of 1899, Der Bärenhäuter (The Bearskin) – a Brothers Grimm fantasy, set at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and involving a good measure of tavern, hunting scenes and ghost stories. Siegfried, just like his illustrious father, was steeped in Teutonic tradition, but his music seems to owe more to, possibly, Weber, or the world of Hansel and Gretel, than to the higher-myths of the Rhine and Valhalla. A thorough recommendation from The QR, and perfect listening for the inwardness of winter and Yuletide evenings.
More historic fare, this time, a landmark performance (from recordings in the Harwood Collection) of a March 1949 Royal Albert Hall performance of the post-Wagnerian, post-Mahlerian Alban Berg’s troubling opera, Wozzeck – a story of the mental and physical disintegration of an soldier (the role sung by Heinrich Nillius), now living a life of penury, but who is heading inexorably to a scenario of murderous horror, having suspected the girl upon whom he is fixated – Marie (Suzanne Danco), another inhabitant of this world of squalor – of unfaithfulness. Having been used for a medical experiment by a Doctor (played by Otakar Kraus), Wozzeck truly symbolises the “abyss of man”, his mind unravelling in hallucinations and jealousy, and in the penultimate scene of the opera, “a blood-stained moon” conveying the half-world and half-light in which this saga exists. But what makes this CD so eye-catching is the fact that it is conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, a figure we tend to associate with the blue-remembered hills of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Like Sir Henry Wood before him, we forget that our English conductors were as a radical as they were conservative, and blazed a trail in their own right for new music.
Stravinsky’s Capriccio is also featured on the disc, in a performance with Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and solo pianist, Noel Mewton-Wood, recorded in BBC studios in 1948. And the collection ends in expansive style, with Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, a fraught, torrential, turmoil-filled inter-war work that seems to be by a different composer altogether from the writer of The Lark Ascending. Occasionally, though, a glimpse of the pastoral England can be heard in the Fourth, but a landscape seen, maybe, through Wozzeck’s eyes: a countryside with a slate-grey sky and a febrile tremor in the mind and in the distance… Recorded on the 21st July 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall, the Proms audience gives a magnificent ovation to the Royal Opera House Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian.
Music by Bliss, next: the 1944 ballet set in the backstreets of Glasgow, Miracle in the Gorbals – a piece with all the disembodied, jagged social scenery that you find in Berg’s Wozzeck – suicides, prostitutes, strangers and streets paved with danger. Conductor Michael Seal (himself once an orchestral player) brings the score to dazzling life in a thrilling performance with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Salford. Chandos sound-engineers win yet again with their state-of-the-art sound, which serves well the late masterpiece by Bliss, his 40-minute-long Metamorphic Variations (1972 – first given in 1973 under the baton of Vernon Handley), which begins with an unforgettable, brooding Larghetto Tranquillomovement – the dark saying of the opening oboe line setting a scene of profundity, but which is later dispelled by more disjointed, faster themes.
From BIS recordings, Britten’s Diversions for the Left Hand (1940, revised 1954), the Tippett Piano Concerto (1953-55) and Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante (1927, but revised 16 years later) make a triumphant trio of important, but – strangely – neglected British works. In the hands of Clare Hammond, one of our most admired pianists, these exciting concerto pieces reveal not just the genius of their composers, but (like the Bliss and Vaughan Williams mentioned earlier) the style and form of a whole golden era of our music: the unique fusion of nostalgic lyricism and light – especially in the Walton – interwoven with dynamic, often stretched tonality; and in the Britten and Walton, an intricate embroidery of variation upon variation, of abstract ideas, which somehow managed to sound as though they have been drawn, as if by water-divining magic from the fen, meadow and megalith landscape of England. George Vass and the BBC Symphony Orchestra give a razor-sharp accompaniment to Clare’s brilliant detail, but those who know Vernon Handley’s version of the Sinfonia Concertante may prefer his faster tempo and ‘thicker’ orchestral sound. But that is not to say that the BIS performance is anything other than completely satisfying and substantial in its well-captured recorded studio sound.
Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review.
CD details:
Siegfried Wagner conducts Richard Wagner, SOMM ARIADNE 5043-2.
Berg, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, SOMM ARIADNE 5024-2.
Bliss, Miracle in the Gorbals/Metamorphic Variations, Chandos CHSA 5370.
Walton, Britten, Tippett, BIS -2604. (SACD)
