Reference Recordings has built its reputation on sonic architecture — the kind of sound that makes you sit up straight and listen all over again to music you thought you knew. This disc, pairing two of the great English Romantics in works that sit comfortably in the repertoire without quite commanding it, delivers on that acoustic promise. Whether it fully delivers musically is another question.
Start with the sound itself. The opening horn and bassoon solos emerge from near silence with a presence and warmth that most concert halls can’t quite replicate. The cellos glow. Instruments occupy precise positions in a believable space. For anyone who has invested in high-resolution playback equipment, this is demonstration material — the kind of disc you hand to a skeptic.
But then the music has to go somewhere.
Vaughan Williams wrote the incidental music for The Wasps in 1909 for a Cambridge production of Aristophanes — undergraduate theater, yes, but the score that eventually emerged shows a composer finding his English voice just as he was beginning his serious immersion in folk song. The Overture’s buzzing, insistent trills ought to make you feel genuinely pestered. Here they’re polite. Michael Stern’s Kansas City players bring crispness and ensemble discipline to the Allegro that follows, and there’s genuine swagger in the playing — the brass confident, the woodwinds nimble — but you miss the slightly rough-edged, almost rustic quality that Adrian Boult, among others, understood was native to this music. Boult’s old EMI disc still catches something that eludes more polished accounts: the sense that Vaughan Williams was working in a tradition that predates the concert hall.
The suite’s inner movements fare better. The first Entr’acte is restrained and properly lilting, the Kitchen Utensils’ March cheerfully offhand in exactly the right way. And the final Ballet — which launches, startlingly, as a tarantella before the music remembers itself — has genuine energy here. This isn’t a interpretation to displace the benchmark British versions, but it’s a respectable account from an orchestra that is clearly doing serious work.
The “Fantasia on Greensleeves” is brief enough that a director’s interpretive hand shows immediately. Stern’s take is cool, almost severe — not dreamily Romantic in the way the piece often invites, which is either a virtue or a problem depending on your taste. The introductory phrases feel slightly inert, though the flute’s clean articulation in the filigree passages is genuinely attractive. When the gently rocking main theme settles in, the playing finds a loveliness that the opening had withheld. The middle section, drawn from Vaughan Williams’s opera Sir John in Love — which audiences hear far too rarely — is neatly handled, setting up the return with understated grace.
Then the Enigma Variations, and this is where the stakes rise.
Elgar finished the Variations in 1899, and what he produced was something unprecedented in English music — a psychological portrait gallery, fourteen friends and one self-portrait, all bound together by an unidentified theme that, as Elgar famously insisted, “goes” with a melody never heard. The mystery has generated more scholarly heat than light over the past century. What matters is that the music works, and works with an intimacy that demands complete emotional commitment from performers.
Stern’s opening statement — Elgar’s theme stated plainly, almost vulnerably, in the strings — is clear and refined, but the subito piano nearly evaporates entirely, which is the kind of thing that can happen when a production prioritizes sonic transparency over the natural acoustic of musicians in a room making a spontaneous decision. The variations that follow are nicely shaped in aggregate: reed triplets warmly caressed in the second variation, clean skittish runs in the third, a chipper hesitation waltz later on. When Troyte arrives — that thunderous portrait of the architect Arthur Troyte Griffith, Elgar’s impatience with a failed piano lesson transformed into something close to orchestral violence — the performance finds real energy.
Two variations genuinely stand out. “Nimrod” — the great slow variation, a portrait of August Jaeger and one of the most quietly devastating pages in all of English music — is given an unusually prayerful, almost reverent reading here. It’s a real interpretation, not just radiant playing. The climax doesn’t quite crest with the power the music needs, partly a matter of string mass, but the spirit is right and the intention is clear. The “Romanza” also registers, with genuine delicacy and a sense of private communication.
The string body — and this is the honest reservation — simply lacks the weight and richness to fully sustain Elgar’s grandest moments. This is no insult to Kansas City. Elgar wrote for the BBC Symphony, the London Symphony, orchestras with sixty-odd strings and generations of this repertoire in their bones. The Enigma lives or dies on the strings.
Still. Michael Stern is a conductor with real musical intelligence, and this is a carefully considered, beautifully recorded account that will give genuine pleasure. As a sonic document, it belongs in the collection. As an interpretation, it earns its place on the shelf — just not at the front of it.
