After his impressive record of mature orchestral Wagner, D'Avalos turns to early melodrama. Wagner wrote Die Feen when he was 20 and it clearly anticipates the better-known Rienzi, though it hasn't a tune to match the opening melody of that piece. Das Liebesverbot is an extraordinary hotch-potch, complete with castanets as well as lurid brass scoring and plenty of rhetoric. The Faust Overture begins more promisingly in a Lisztian vein, but in the end disappoints. The performances of the first two pieces are properly rumbustious, but the rest of the programme, though well played, is in no way distinctive.
This is clearly a collection for Wagnerians interested in the composer's confidently unsophisticated early handling of the orchestra, while he steadily gained in experience of what could be achieved. The highly spontaneous Overture for Der fliegende Hollander was the last number of the score to be written in 1841, and it clearly looks to the future.'