This is the ideal record to play to Wagnerites who get above themselves. has any great composer, otherwise at the height of his powers, written worse music than the Grosser Festmarsch—also known as the American Centennial March? Its more relaxed moments may just hint at Wagner's major concerns of the 1870s, but the leaden repetitions of its main material represent the composer as not merely nodding but comatose.
In a way, it was brave of Marco Polo not to sweeten the medicine by including one of the Master's more significant orchestral works. Had they done so, however, the result would have made the gulf between greatness and bathos all the more explicit. The best music on the record is the Kaisermarsch, whose quieter moments have a Meistersinger-ish breadth, aided by near-quotations from that work's processional music. Wagner also calls on Ein' feste Burg without belittling the noble chorale, and although authenticity requires the presence of a chorus to hymn Kaiser Wilhelm in the final stages, its absence is no great loss.
The two overtures are both very early, both almost gruesomely protracted affairs, though Polonia has some Rossinian brio, and Rule Britannia strikingly confronts Arne's indestructible tune with chromatic shudders foreshadowing Der fliegende Hollander. The performances are strong on energy, less so on polish. Wind and brass intoation can distort in protracted fortissimos, of which there are are many, and the recording is short on atmosphere and depth, confining thickly-scored textures which cry out for wide open spaces. No other versions of these works are currently available in any format, save for a brass arrangement of the Grosser Festmarsch played by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble (Decca 414 149-1DH; CD 414 149-2DH, 10/85).'