Günter Wand spent decades as one of the best-kept secrets in German musical life, presiding over the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne for twenty-some years while the international disc industry chased younger, flashier names. He passed seventy before the wider world caught up with him. By then, of course, his authority was absolute — the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself.
This five-disc Profil anniversary set, assembled to mark the centenary of his birth in Elberfeld in 1912, draws on live NDR recordings made in Hamburg across roughly a decade and a half, from the early 1990s back toward the late 1980s. What it offers, above all, is Wand in the act of making music rather than documents — the distinction matters enormously with this conductor.
The Brahms symphonies are the core of the set, and they are something to reckon with. Wand understood Brahms the way very few conductors have: not as a Romantic struggling to sound Classical, not as a neo-Baroque architect, but as a composer for whom argument is emotion, inseparable, indistinguishable. The first movement of the Symphony No. 1 in c minor unfolds here with the weight of inevitability — that grinding chromatic ascent in the introduction feels genuinely prehistoric, as though the music has been waiting underground for centuries. Wand never rushes it toward its eventual C major resolution; he trusts the architecture completely. The finale’s famous horn call, when it arrives, sounds less like a theatrical gesture than a quiet announcement that something long promised has finally come to pass.
The Symphony No. 4 in D major is, if anything, even finer. This is a score that invites sentimentality at every turn, and Wand refuses every invitation. The slow movement breathes without sighing. The third movement — that lilting, slightly melancholy intermezzo — dances without becoming coy. And the finale has genuine weight, not the portentous grandeur some conductors impose on it but something more like earned solemnity.
The Symphony No. 4 in e minor is perhaps Wand’s greatest achievement among the Brahms here. The passacaglia finale — thirty-two variations over a ground bass drawn from Bach’s cantata Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich — moves with the force of deep water. Wand shapes the variations not as a series of character pieces but as a single vast arc, so that when the brass finally seize the theme in the open, the effect is genuinely overwhelming. The NDR strings respond with playing that is lean and focused, almost austere, which is exactly right.
The Bruckner is a different story — not a lesser one, but a different one. Wand came to Bruckner with the patience of a geologist, and these NDR performances of the Symphony No. 4 in e-flat major and Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major (both in original versions, which matters) have a particular character: less polished than the later Berlin Philharmonic recordings for RCA, more exposed, occasionally rougher at the edges. But rough in the way a stone wall is rough — structurally sound, and honest. The Romantic — and Bruckner himself supplied that nickname, so we can use it — opens with its famous horn call emerging from a tremolo string haze, and Wand gives it space to actually mean something rather than merely beginning things. The Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, always the most forbiddingly contrapuntal of the Bruckner nine, receives a reading of extraordinary clarity; the double fugue in the finale sounds not like a theoretical demonstration but like an act of faith.
The set ends, somewhat unexpectedly, with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Ravel’s orchestration, and the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in b-flat minor, with Jorge Bolet as soloist. The Mussorgsky is vigorous and colorful, Wand letting the NDR brass have their head in “The Great Gate of Kiev” without turning the whole thing into a circus. The Bolet-Tchaikovsky is the real surprise. Bolet — the Cuban-American pianist who had his own late-career rediscovery roughly contemporaneous with Wand’s — brings a grand, unhurried manner to the concerto that suits Wand’s temperament perfectly. There’s no barnstorming here, no cheap excitement. The opening movement breathes. The slow movement is genuinely poetic. Some listeners will find it too cool; I find it deeply musical.
A word about the sound. These are live recordings, captured in Hamburg over more than a decade, and the engineering is what it is — decent, occasionally a little dry, never spectacular. You will not mistake this for a demonstration disc. But the performances are captured with sufficient presence that the music — and Wand’s mind inside the music — comes through without obstruction.
Wand died in 2002, a few weeks before his ninetieth birthday. He had, in his final decade, become the maestro to whom serious listeners turned for Bruckner above almost anyone else — his Berlin Philharmonic accounts of Symphonies 7, 8, and 9 remain, in my view, among the supreme recordings in the orchestral literature. This NDR set is a step below that level, as live performances with a somewhat less refined orchestra inevitably would be. But it is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand how the great German symphonic tradition sounded in the hands of someone who had absorbed it from the inside out — not learned it from scores and recordings, but carried it in his bones.
