Wagner Orchestral Works – Szell and Cleveland Orchestra

George Szell never made peace with sloppiness. Not in an orchestra’s ensemble, not in a phrase’s contour, not in the relationship between a downbeat and what followed it. That severity — and it was severity, whatever his admirers preferred to call it — defined the Cleveland Orchestra he built across three decades, and it defines this album too, made across two sessions in 1962 and 1968 in Severance Hall, that acoustically fortunate room on Euclid Avenue that seemed almost designed to flatter the particular sonority Szell cultivated: transparent, lean in the bass, strings with an almost abrasive clarity at the top.

Wagner, you might think, wants something else entirely.

The surprise of this disc — and it is a genuine surprise, even after repeated hearings — is how completely Szell’s aesthetic turns out to serve this music. Wagner is so often performed as though grandeur required blurring, as though the sheer accumulated mass of the orchestra justified a certain lubricating imprecision in the ensemble. Szell won’t have it. Every line in “Siegfried‘s Funeral Music” arrives on time, and the result isn’t a chilly reduction of the music’s emotional weight but something close to the opposite: the grief feels earned rather than wallowed in, structural rather than merely atmospheric. The horns — and this orchestra’s horn section in this period was simply one of the great collective instruments in American orchestral life — play with a burnished weight that has nothing to do with brute force. They bloom.

Karajan, the obvious point of comparison throughout any Wagner discography of this era, worked differently. His Berlin Philharmonic recordings of the late 1960s and 1970s have a voluptuous continuity, a sense that the music is secreting its own forward motion from within. Szell’s Cleveland is more articulated, more exposed — you hear the architecture. Whether that’s what you want from Wagner is, admittedly, a matter of taste and temperament. But I’d argue the case for Szell more strongly than I once would have.

The Die Meistersinger overture catches you slightly off guard. Szell was not a director one associated with ease, with the genial civic warmth that Sachs embodies and that the overture announces so broadly. But this account breathes. The counterpoint in the development section — three themes simultaneously, Wagner showing off magnificently — comes through with a clarity that Böhm, say, rarely achieved without some sacrifice of momentum. And the close, all that accumulated C major, lands with genuine weight.

Less persuasive, marginally, is the Tristan material — the Prelude and “Liebestod” in the familiar concert arrangement. The cor anglais solo that bridges the two sections is played with lovely restraint, the tone slightly veiled, properly yearning. But the Prelude as a whole wants a certain erotic haze that Szell’s discipline keeps just slightly at arm’s length. Furtwängler understood that the music’s forward pull depends on a kind of rhythmic ambiguity — you should never be quite certain when the next downbeat will arrive. Szell is too honest for that. His Tristan is magnificent; it is not quite mysterious.

None of which diminishes the achievement substantially. The recorded sound — full, warm, immediate without being aggressive — serves the orchestra’s virtues without flattering its limitations, and at nearly eighty minutes the program is genuinely generous. One disc, one orchestra at its absolute peak.

What haunts the listening, a little, is the thought of what might have been. Had Szell lived — he died in 1970, at seventy-three, just as the recording industry was beginning to think seriously about complete Ring cycles from American orchestras — he might have given us something remarkable. The Cleveland of this period could have done it. The project floated briefly in the Dohnányi years but foundered, and by then the orchestra had changed and the great Wagner singers were elsewhere or gone. We have this instead: orchestral excerpts, voices absent, and yet the music insists on itself so forcefully that you find, somewhere around the third time through “Siegfried‘s Funeral Music,” that you’ve been humming the Siegfried theme under your breath without noticing.

That’s not nothing. That’s quite a lot, actually.