Wagner: Faust Overture, WWV59 - SACD

Neeme Järvi conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the fourth album of their Wagner series.

Their performances on the previous three volumes have received high critical acclaim. American Record Guide wrote of Volume 1: ‘This is wonderful playing and sound… Järvi knows exactly what to do to make the music speak. The orchestra sounds better than I’ve ever heard them.’

This disc features a symphonic arrangement by the Dutch composer and percussionist Henk de Vlieger of Wagner’s only comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It is the only opera by Wagner centred round a specific time and place in history, rather than a mythical or legendary past. The story takes place in Nuremberg during the middle of the sixteenth century, and revolves around the real-life guild of the Master Singers, an association of amateur poets and musicians who developed a craftsman-like approach to music-making.

Wagner left the two early Entreactes tragiques unfinished, the first only partially orchestrated, and they are heard here in orchestrations completed by De Vlieger.

Completing the disc are the seldom performed and recorded Overture to Columbus, and Eine Faust-Ouvertüre by Wagner. Written in 1835, when Wagner was just twenty-two years old, the Weber-influenced Columbus Overture introduces the play by Theodor Apel. His Faust-Overture followed in 1840. Taking its inspiration from Goethe’s famous play, this work, together with Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, became the main example of nineteenth-century programme music.

This is the second volume of a set of multi-channel Hybrid SACD recordings by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic under renowned conductor Edo de Waart that features the orchestral music of Richard Wagner. The new disc includes The Ride of the Valkyries, the Overtures ‘Die Feen’ and ‘Faust’, the Prelude to Act 3 of Die Meistersinger, and Siegfried-Idyll.

Edo de Waart was Chief Conductor of the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra from 1989-2004, and is now its conductor Laureate. His early career took off when he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Conducting Competition in New York, and that resulted in his appointment as Assistant Conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic. On his return to Holland he was appointed Assistant Conductor to Bernard Haitink at the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and in 1973 he was appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Although at different times in his career Richard Wagner planned series of programmatic concert overtures and one-movement symphonies, he actually wrote remarkably little concert music. This disc contains the two most substantial concert works of his maturity, the Faust Overture and the Siegfried Idyll. These works are complemented on this recording by two of Wagner’s early operatic overtures, and by two excerpts from his later music-dramas. It is the second volume of a set of multi-channel Hybrid SACD recordings by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and conductor Edo de Waart to feature Wagner’s orchestral music. The first volume (OVCL00153) was released in January and included the Preludes to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Preludes and Overtures from Parsifal, Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman, Tristan and Isolde, and Tannhauser.