Bavarian RSO / Jansons, Royal Festival Hall, London
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Your support makes all the difference.It used to be regular practice among purist critics to deplore the concert programming of Wagner in "bleeding chunks". Actually, Wagner himself extracted passages from his music dramas to use on fundraising tours, even patching his own endings for some of them. And why not, when the presentation, full on, of his scoring from the concert platform can often gloriously enhance sonority and reveal detail lost in pit?
This all-Wagner bill in the Royal Festival Hall by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor Mariss Jansons made much of the opportunity. Although this orchestra, even under this revelatory conductor, may not be the glitziest, they play with an innate feeling for the long Wagnerian phrase and a surpassing warmth of tone.
The programme comprised an intricate balance of early and late Wagner. In the first half, the synoptic Overture, Tannhäuser (1845) and festive Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin (1848), alternated with "Siegfried's Rhine Journey" (1874) – a wonderfully exultant reading – and the crushingly grand "Siegfried's Funeral Music" (1874) from Gotterdämmerung, a juxtaposition that heightened the vast textural and stylistic enrichment of the later style.
The point was clinched after the interval by the Bacchanale added to Tannhäuser for the disastrous Paris staging of 1861, in which Wagner reworked material from its Overture in a more frenziedly erotic idiom after completing Tristan und Isolde (1859). Upon which, the Japanese mezzo Mihoko Fujimura sang the five Wesendonck Lieder (1858), composed as studies for Tristan – a strong, even voice, if a little austere in timbre quite to realise the music's sensuality.
Thence back to earlier Wagner with a radiant account of the Prelude to Act 1 of Lohengrin – that, in its time, astonishingly original study in seamless transition and orchestral blendings. And so to the centre of Wagner's career with the "Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walküre (1856), one of the most mechanical tunes he wrote, but, in a reading of the barbaric splendour in which he presents it as unbridled as this, nobody in a full and excited house seemed too bothered.
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