WAGNER GALA 1994
Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Studer, Meier, Jerusalem etc.
Deutsche Grammophon 073 214-2
Wagner in concert is no substitute for the incomparable experience the works in the opera house can offer. On a new DVD from Deutsche Grammophon Abbado again conducts, this time a New Year's Eve Concert with the Berlin Philharmonic, no less. But even so the effect is dreadfully disappointing. The overture to Tannhauser is given, considering what it can be made to sound like, a manifestly sedated performance. The soloists are stellar names — Cheryl Studer, Waltraut Meier, Siegfried Jerusalem and Bryn Terfel (this last less than stellar, in my view) — but nothing can by-pass the essential absurdity of modern people dressed up to the nines singing this kind of music out of its theatrical context. Here DVD offers nothing — if anything, the image actually distracts. If you want to hear Wagner sung as it should be, then listen to the CD of Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehemann in Act One of Die Walkure, recorded, astonishingly, in 1935 (EMI CDH 7 61020 2). After that you won't, I think, feel in need of anything very much else.
ARTUR RUBINSTEIN
Piano Concertos
Conductor: Andre Previn
Deutsche Grammophon 073 4195
Polish-born Artur Rubinstein was one of the 20th century's greatest pianists. On a newly-released DVD from Deutsche Grammophon you see him play Grieg's Piano Concerto plus the second piano concertos of Chopin and Saint-Saens. The recordings were made in the Fairfield Hall, Croyden UK, in 1975. It's all wonderful, and there's not much else to be said about it. Rubinstein is celebrated for his inspired matter-of-factness, his lack of affectation and the strength that flowed from it.
You must judge for yourself from these recordings. Don't, however, miss the 29-minute interview with Rubinstein at 90, recorded in his home in Paris in 1977 and included as a Bonus track. He praises his Jewish forebears for holding on to their religion for 2,000 years, and shrugs off any suggestion of his own uniqueness. “Nothing in art is the best,” he says. “It's only different.” Listening recently to Japan's stunning neo-punk line-up The Savas (www.peoplesrecords.net), I couldn't agree more.
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