Wagner Orchestral Excerpts by Szell and Cleveland Orchestra

There is a particular kind of orchestral perfection that belongs to a specific American moment — the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the great ensembles were flush with postwar prosperity, staffed by players who had grown up inside a tradition of ruthless excellence, and led by conductors who had come of age in central Europe and brought old-world discipline to new-world ambition. George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra was perhaps the apex of that moment. Not the warmest, not the most sensuous — but the most precise, the most unsparing, the most intellectually committed ensemble on the continent.

Which makes this disc a fascinating document, and occasionally a surprising one.

Wagner orchestral excerpts are not, on the face of it, natural territory for Szell. His gifts ran toward transparency, architecture, the exposed line. Wagner’s orchestral writing — even when it has been surgically extracted from its dramatic context — tends to reward conductors who think in waves rather than in arguments, who let the harmony breathe and swell and pull. Furtwängler was the master of that. Szell was emphatically not Furtwängler.

The Lohengrin Prelude to Act III is a revelation — or at least a reconsideration. Szell builds the thing with such controlled inevitability, the tension accumulating over nine minutes like a coiled spring, that when the music finally opens into its radiant conclusion you feel you’ve been somewhere. Rudolf Kempe’s version, recorded for EMI in the complete opera a couple of years before, remains the ethereal standard — Kempe knew how to make an orchestra sound like it was emanating from a distance, from somewhere just beyond the visible world. Szell’s reading is cooler, more austere, slightly earthbound by comparison. But that control has its own satisfactions.

The Flying Dutchman overture suits him better still. This is Wagner at his most urgent, most storm-driven — the music has the quality of something that cannot stop, that must drive forward or collapse entirely. Szell obliges. The horns are flawless, a particular pleasure in music that can expose a section mercilessly. And at the start of the coda — around the nine-minute mark — you can almost sense the director willing the orchestra to a higher level of intensity, the kind of moment that separates a great live reading from a merely accomplished one. Whether that effect is real or projected by a credulous listener, I honestly cannot say. But it’s there.

Rienzi. Now there’s a problem. Wagner himself couldn’t decide what to think of his early grand opera — he found it embarrassing in retrospect, the work of a young man besotted with Meyerbeer and hungry for a success he hadn’t yet earned. The opera survives in the concert hall only through its overture and the tenor aria “Allmächt’ger Vater,” and the overture at least has the virtue of its own shamelessness. Grand tunes, sometimes redolent of Mendelssohn — odd as that sounds — and a pomposity that is somehow winning rather than irritating when the playing is this committed. Szell makes the strongest possible case for it.

Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra join the program for the Tannhäuser material, and the pairing is instructive. Where Szell’s Cleveland sound was lean and bright, the Philadelphia under Ormandy was an instrument of almost sinful richness — those strings, that particular Philadelphia string sound, a phenomenon of American orchestral culture that has never been quite replicated. The Tannhäuser overture begins more slowly and grandly than one might expect from a conductor not generally associated with Wagnerian weight. The Solti Vienna Philharmonic reading — still the reference in the complete opera — generates more visceral excitement earlier, more sense of irresistible forward momentum. But Ormandy builds his climax with patience and then delivers it fully, the strings swirling and the brass blazing in a way that reminds you just how magnificent that orchestra was in its prime.

The “Festmarsch” from Tannhäuser is, frankly, the most purely enjoyable few minutes on the disc — a piece of ceremonial splendor that the Philadelphia plays with a deep, lush sonority remarkable for its vintage. The 1959 album of the Lohengrin Act II Prelude is the earliest here, and yet the sound remains rich and present, the playing animated and idiomatic.

Sony’s remastering serves the material honestly. These are ADD recordings — the 1964 Philadelphia sessions and the 1965 Cleveland sessions — and they sound like it, in the best sense: there is a directness, a presence, a sense of actual instruments in actual rooms that some modern productions, for all their technical refinement, manage to sand away.

What this disc documents, ultimately, is that the golden age of American orchestral playing was genuinely golden — not a nostalgic illusion, not a critic’s sentimentality about the past. These conductors were not interchangeable. Szell and Ormandy had fundamentally different aesthetics, different ideas about what an orchestra should sound like and what music should do. That their Wagner, placed side by side, produces something coherent and valuable rather than contradictory is itself a kind of argument. Recommended without major reservation.