Handel, Mozart and Beethoven – Wand in Tokyo

Somewhere in the vaults of NHK there must be a filing cabinet devoted entirely to Günter Wand’s Tokyo years, and thank goodness someone finally went looking. What emerges here is not the granite-jawed Brucknerian of the late Schleswig-Holstein or Cologne broadcasts — the maestro who by the 1990s had become, in the minds of record collectors everywhere, synonymous with long paragraphs of Austro-German metaphysics — but a lighter, quicker-footed Wand, one perfectly happy leading Mozart serenades and a Handel overture for a Japanese audience that adored him.

It’s worth remembering that Wand spent nearly three decades at the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, from 1947 to 1974, and that tenure was no exercise in repertoire narrowness. He made a point, for years, of insisting that every single program include something contemporary — Henze next to Haydn, Webern shadowing Schumann. History has flattened him into a specialist, the last of the old-guard Brahms-Bruckner men, and that image isn’t wrong exactly, just incomplete. These discs, drawn from concerts in 1979, 1982, and 1983, restore some of the missing dimension.

The Posthorn Serenade, taped in April 1982, is the real find. Nine movements, the better part of forty minutes, and Wand never lets the structure sag — no mean feat given how easily this piece can wander. The NHK winds distinguish themselves throughout, especially the principal flute in the Andante grazioso, whose phrasing has an unhurried, singing quality that never curdles into preciousness. Ensemble blend within the string choirs is remarkably tidy for what was, after all, a guest engagement rather than a music directorship. You sense an orchestra that has been drilled — properly drilled, in the old Central European sense — without anyone hearing the drilling.

The Haffner Serenade, from December 1983, is nearly as satisfying, though a curious omission mars the documentation: the concertmaster who dispatches the solo violin part in the Rondo — one of those passages violinists have quietly annexed as their own miniature concerto — goes unnamed. Whoever he was, his tone is sweet without being saccharine, and his rhythmic snap in the finale has real wit. One wishes NHK’s archivists had thought to preserve that name for posterity; anonymity seems an odd reward for such elegant fiddling.

Turn to the Handel and matters get more complicated. We get only the Overture from the Music for the Royal Fireworks — no minuets, no bourrée, no rejoicing, alas — and the account, once past a downbeat that never quite settles, indulges in some distinctly un-Baroque stretching of tempo through the lentement section. String tone is full-bodied, even plush, in a manner that owes everything to 1970s interpretation practice and nothing to Redcliffe Salaman or the wave of period-instrument reformers already stirring in London and Amsterdam by this point. Whether you find that a virtue or a vice depends entirely on your tolerance for pre-authenticity Handel — I confess a soft spot for it, guiltily, the way one has a soft spot for an old sweater.

The Organ Concerto in G minor, op. 4 no. 1, brings Lionel Rogg into the mix, and here the results are more mixed still. No harpsichord continuo is audible anywhere in the texture — a real loss, compared with, say, Simon Preston’s characterful 1967 reading alongside Yehudi Menuhin — and the finale, that spry little jig of a movement, gets a tempo so stately, so deliberate, that some of its inflection simply evaporates. Rogg was a fine player, particularly admired for his Bach, but this is Handel wearing the wrong shoes.

Beethoven closes the November 1979 disc, and here Wand sounds entirely himself again — commanding, unhurried, architecturally minded. The Leonore Overture No. 3 unfolds with the kind of long-breathed inevitability that made his later Bruckner so persuasive; the ratcheting crescendo before the offstage trumpet call is genuinely thrilling, and the string tone, so overripe in the Handel, here finds exactly the weight it needs. It’s a reminder that Wand recorded a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Gürzenich decades earlier, tucked away on labels like Nonesuch and Vanguard that record collectors of a certain age remember fondly and everyone else has forgotten.

Sound throughout is more than serviceable — close but not airless, with barely a cough or a program-rustle intruding, a small miracle given the live provenance. Documentation, as ever with this Tokyo FM series, is Japanese-only, which will frustrate Western collectors wanting texts or dates spelled out plainly.

Not an essential Wand issue, then, but a genuinely illuminating one — filling in a corner of his discography that the Bruckner symphonies and the late Schubert have long overshadowed. The Mozart alone justifies the price of admission.