The Metropolitan Opera’s subsequent “Ring” cycle is years away. However for native Wagnerians champing on the bit, the New York Philharmonic supplied a teaser this weekend within the type of Lorin Maazel’s 1987 distillation “The ‘Ring’ With out Phrases.”
The late ’80s had been glory days for the classical file business, reveling within the success of the still-new CD, and Maazel’s 70-minute association, created on the behest of the Telarc label, neatly stuffed a single disc.
As an train, “The ‘Ring’ With out Phrases” — led at David Geffen Corridor by Nathalie Stutzmann, the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — is spectacular. Maazel, the Philharmonic’s conductor within the early 2000s and by all accounts a superb musical thoughts, set himself the problem of creating a synthesis with out pauses that flows by way of the four-opera cycle so as, utilizing solely Wagner’s notes.
The consequence has some arresting how-did-he-do-that moments. The crash of Donner’s hammer, from close to the tip of “Das Rheingold,” is abruptly thunder bringing us into the midst of the storm that opens “Die Walküre.” The sparks of the magic hearth that encircles Brünnhilde in “Walküre” dissolve into the forging of the sword in “Siegfried.”
Maazel renders the seams in these crosscuts artfully invisible. But there’s a cool effectivity to the work that squares with its origins as a company product. Wagner’s 15-hour cycle is stuffed with grandeur and emotion, however although the efficiency on Sunday rose to clanging climaxes, it barely instructed the operas’ scope from the epic to the intimate; this was merely a brisk rundown.
A part of that was the Philharmonic’s fault. For “The ‘Ring’ With out Phrases” to make any actual influence, it needs to be dazzlingly performed. On Sunday, some passages had been extra clear than ordinary — you would hear the flutes by way of all of the speeding arpeggios on the daybreak of “Das Rheingold” — and the string prospers had chew at first of the “Journey of the Valkyries” and in Siegfried’s funeral march.
However there was additionally squareness relatively than timelessness in that mysterious starting of “Rheingold,” in addition to some iffy intonation within the brasses, and a few unsteady entrances and transitions that had been notable on condition that it was this system’s third and closing efficiency.
I had a greater time on Friday night, when Stutzmann led a smaller group of musicians in Bach on the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The Philharmonic normally provides a free Memorial Day live performance there, however this season it was rescheduled for winter.
This was easy, mellow, warmly spirited Bach — old school in a great way, like a throwback to the period earlier than spikier, quicker Baroque interpretation grew to become the norm even for normal symphonic forces.
The acoustics of St. John the Divine are challengingly reverberant, and a few of the delicate baritone Leon Kosavic’s smooth singing within the cantata “Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen” was misplaced. However he was wonderful, as was the soprano Talise Trevigne, who sang one other cantata, “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen,” with brightly florid but melting tone.
The large church is definitely higher suited to chamber music than giant ensembles, as an outstanding, swish quartet — Yoobin Son, flute; I-Jung Huang, violin; Sumire Kudo, cello; Paolo Bordignon, harpsichord — confirmed within the “Sonata sopra il Soggetto Reale” from the “Musical Providing.”
It was all extra transferring than “The ‘Ring’ With out Phrases.” However on Sunday the viewers was no less than left with an immaculately luminous closing chord, and it was gratifying to see Stutzmann acclaimed by the orchestra after her final large gig in New York went considerably awry.
Two years in the past, she made her Met debut main a pair of recent Mozart productions in repertory. She made a jokey remark in a New York Occasions preview article that for some motive set off the Met’s musicians, who twisted her which means right into a criticism of their work ethic; they even aired their complaints on social media.
However on Sunday, when the applause introduced her again onstage at Geffen Corridor and she or he gestured to the orchestra to face, the members honored her by remaining seated, letting Stutzmann take a solo bow.
New York Philharmonic
Carried out at David Geffen Corridor and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Manhattan.
