The focus here is on the ceremonial music of Wagner’s years in Dresden, that highly unstable time in the 1840s between the initial success of Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman, the completion of Tannhauser and Lohengrin, and the conception of the great music dramas.
Wagner’s view of himself as the new Beethoven is most apparent in the large-scale choral scena Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (“The Love-Feast of the Apostles”), where he reverses the Choral Symphony’s revolutionary ploy of introducing the human voice at a late stage, keeping a large orchestra silent during an extended passage of unaccompanied choral music. The eventual entry of the instruments is a thrilling moment, compensating to no small extent for the rather foursquare, repetitive writing that precedes and succeeds it.
The three other rarities here (which aren’t otherwise currently available on disc) are unlikely to do as much to stir the blood, though the Trauermusik for wind orchestra on motifs from Weber’s Euryanthe is an effective piece, and sounds particularly well in the resonant spaces of Dresden’s Lukaskirche.
This spacious acoustic, and the excellent modern sound, are the main reasons for preferring Plasson’s account of Das Liebesmahl der Apostel to that of Boulez. He also offers an atmospheric reading of the familiar Faust Overture, but is less persuasive in the Siegfried Idyll, which is simply not idyllic enough. Plasson is too keen to push the music on, for example, in the horn cadenza, and the sheer weight of sound becomes counter-productive. A lower expressive temperature and a smaller complement of players would surely have been more appropriate.'