The ways of record companies are sometimes puzzling. This set was recorded three years ago just at the time Decca reissued their version, in turn made three years earlier, Sony perhaps delaying the new set’s release as long to avoid too immediate a comparison. I wish I could find much to admire in the new issue, but in truth it comes nowhere near matching the thoroughgoing mastery of the Decca or the various merits of the other sets listed above.
Yes, Ben Heppner is the most lyrical and perhaps most musical of Eriks on any version, superior even to Naxos’s admirable Seiffert. Yes, another transatlantic tenor, Paul Groves, is ideal as the Steuermann. Yes, Rootering is a solid, respectable Daland and Svenden a lively Mary. But these are peripheral roles: the success of any interpretation rests on the casting of the Dutchman and Senta, and on the conductor’s ability to encompass at once the extraordinary originality and the inner turmoil of the remarkable score. On all three counts it substantially fails.
James Morris, a notable Dutchman in the theatre, sounds studio-bound. He seems more like a kind uncle than the tormented, ever-travelling seaman of Wagner’s vivid imagining. Very little of the anguish to be found in the readings of Hale (Dohnanyi), even more in Crass (Sawallisch) and Uhde (Knappertsbusch), the latter two caught live at Bayreuth, is heard in Morris’s secure but benign tones. Similarly Voigt has all the notes – and that’s saying something for the taxing part of Senta – but her delivery is undifferentiated, her reading blank and placid. Where is the obsessive love and dedication of the deluded girl? You may find Behrens (Dohnanyi) occasionally squally, but she does convey wholly the single-minded passion and infatuation that is a sine qua non in this role. Silja does that even better, both for Klemperer and Sawallisch.
The main reason, I fancy, why these two principals make such little effect is Levine’s galumphing, alternatively becalmed and bombastic conducting (by the way, he chooses the one-act version though the booklet splits the work into three). After a staid spinning chorus without any sense of whirr and stir, Senta’s ballad is taken at a lumberingly emphatic tempo without any sense of eager story-telling: indeed the speed is so slow that the number has to carry over on to the second CD, an uncomfortable disc-break. In (presumably) an effort to make “Wie aus der Ferne” sound inward and mysterious Levine goes even more slowly, creating boredom rather than tension. Then the music almost comes to a stop before Erik’s cavatina and earlier in this scene the stomping of the Norwegian sailors is unacceptably deliberate. I won’t go on: try any other recording and you’ll realize the folly of Levine’s approach. It is significant that Levine takes 20 minutes longer over the score than Steinberg, ten minutes longer than Dohnanyi.
As if to emphasize the weightiness of the reading, the orchestra sound unnaturally heavy and forwardly placed (no orchestra of Wagner’s time would surely have sounded so voluminous) – comparison with the ideal Decca balance is most marked (Manhattan Center is, in any case, no rival as a recording venue for the Vienna Musikverein), and as a consequence soloists and chorus are too recessed. The women of the chorus are surprisingly thin and unsteady, but the magnificence of the Metropolitan orchestra is never in doubt even if it is not always put to good use here.
I hurried back to older versions to have my faith in the score renewed. Dohnanyi is definitely the best of modern versions, but even he cannot quite match the frisson of excitement caught at Bayreuth either with Nelsson or Sawallisch – or Knappertsbusch: his 1955 recording, with the superb Astrid Varnay and Hermann Uhde, the most anguished, authoritative Dutchman of all, is now on Music & Arts in excellent mono sound, a historic document to savour.
Klemperer is the only one to catch the whirl and tension of the amazing score in the studio, but since we last traversed this territory EMI have, perversely, upped the set to full price (though they have remastered it). Even so it remains an astonishing achievement. Nor can Steinberg’s no-nonsense version (I am certain closer to Wagnerian authenticity, in most respects, than Levine) at super-budget price, be overlooked. The choice is far too wide to leave room for this unsatisfactory newcomer.'