 Germany,
and Bayreuth in particular, were not exactly forthcoming with official
releases for Wagner 200 year. Thielemann, the festival’s de facto music
director, led three birthday concerts of which, it has to be said, this
is by far the least interesting in terms of making up a single concert.
Hopefully the big choral event in Dresden’s Frauenkirche – it included
both Das Liebesmahl der Apostel and the music for the reburial of
Weber’s ashes – is still to come. Avid and online collectors will, of
course, have had all of this material from Dresden and Bayreuth since
last May.
If some hypothetical draconian law were to ban the DVD
ing of one kind of music-making, orchestral concerts by living
conductors should be high on the list. By all means let the filming be
streamed and accessible but…for regular viewing? The only interesting
things that happen here from a visual point of view are Kaufmann’s three
numbers – aside from his musical achievement he has both natural
presence and the ability to put over the content of the narrations in
gripping but unhistrionic fashion – and the different degrees to which
Thielemann ‘knows’ the music he conducts (from head in score for the
Henze to hardly conducting the Holländer and Tannhäuser excerpts at
all).
Pardon a critic’s moans but this is a DVD: the medium is
the message, and I found watching this one boring. That said, the
music-making is absolutely world-class. Orchestra, conductor and singer
do not disappoint, especially the Dresden strings which, on this day,
were on some kind of seraphic high of their own. For the record, the
Henze is a lovely piece, gorgeously and lushly scored somewhat in the
manner of a big-orchestra version of the opera Elegy for Young Lovers.
It had to be substituted for the commissioned Isoldes Tod that the
composer’s death prevented his completing. Thielemann is quite
restrained in the climaxes of the Holländer and Rienzi overtures but
most involved in an expertly paced Tannhäuser’s Act 3 narrative. For
some reason (chorus balance?) the concert’s encore, the Entry of the
Guests from Tannhäuser, is omitted. The sound is good enough to enjoy
the heavenly string tone but a CD would have been more effective.
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