Wagner Tristan und Isolde – An Orchestral Passion (arr. Henk de Vlieger) Staatskapelle Weimar/Hansjörg Albrecht Oehms Classics OC 1729 58:02 mins
Wagner reductions for orchestra are now almost commonplace. A few months ago in these columns, I praised Andrew Gourlay’s brilliant 45-minute orchestral ‘construction’ of his Parsifal Suite out of Wagner’s 270-minute opera, with creative liberties successfully taken in the ordering of the work’s sections. Tristan und Isolde is another popular site for reductive plunder, the most extreme example of which was Leopold Stokowski’s 28-minute ‘symphonic synthesis’ in the 1930s of the Prelude, the love duet and the finale. In 1994 the Dutch composer and arranger Henk de Vlieger embarked on a much more ambitious project – a through-composed hour without a break and without voices, which nevertheless sought to convey the whole story.
The release is headed with the words ‘symphonic compilation’, but the subtitle by Vlieger to his arrangement is ‘an orchestral passion’, and that is how this work comes over, as performed by the Staatskapelle Weimar under Hansjörg Albrecht’s baton. Albrecht’s players establish a magical silkiness in the Prelude, delicately reflect Isolde’s arousal after the horn call in Act II and create a hallucinatory momentum for the lovers’ mounting excitement until they are struck dumb by the arrival of King Mark.
Wagner told Mathilde Wesendonk, who at least partly inspired this landmark opera, that mediocre performances were safer with this work, because a really good performance ‘would drive people mad’. By that token, this fine performance – in which solo instruments brilliantly stand in for human voices – should come with a health warning.
Michael Church