The Wagner bicentennial marches on, bringing grand sounds from practically every corner of the musical earth. What appear most frequently on concert programs are various extracts from the operas, such as the collection of preludes, overture, and vocal and orchestral excerpts offered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Daniele Gatti at Carnegie Hall. This kind of programming runs the risk of coming across as a tasty but haphazard smorgasbord; composer and musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey denounced these “bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas”. On this occasion, however, Wagner’s inspiration shone through magnificent orchestral playing, even if the interpretations sometimes fell short of the intensity that the music demands.
The evening began promisingly, with concert excerpts from Götterdämmerung, Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, and Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music, all performed as a single stretch of music. The meandering opening, dominated by the leitmotif for fate, was spacious and restrained. The music then effortlessly climbed out of the murk to a grand exaltation in the brass, as Siegfried and Brünnhilde emerge on a mountaintop. Throughout the performance Gatti excelled at moments like these, bringing an intuitive sense of breath and phrasing, letting the orchestra build up a head of steam on some of the most fun-to-play moments in the repertoire. As Brünnhilde sends Siegfried off in search of further heroic exploits, he sounds his famous horn call, played offstage with appropriate swagger by principal horn James Sommerville, who made a quick dash onstage to rejoin his section. In the exuberant passage of dense counterpoint that follows, the BSO brass played with remarkable clarity and energy, proving that the orchestra hasn’t lost a step in its past two years without a music director.
Without pausing, Gatti and the orchestra plunged directly into Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music, jump-cutting into the moment where the hero is stabbed, followed by his dying soliloquy (without voices, of course), and then the instrumental funeral march itself. Arranged this way, the death scene might be called the work with a thousand endings. Long silences divide phrases of varied emotions, which might sound more cohesive if the vocal parts and the dramatic context were present. Under Gatti, the climaxes were impressive, but the silences were leaden rather than haunted. It might have had something to do with his precise and very sharp cutoffs, disconnecting the phrases from each other.
A professional orchestra playing the Tannhäuser overture is the musical version of a reunion of old friends: it is a piece that most musicians have played since high school, and they take to it with familiar ease. Gatti would have done better to have gotten out of their way a bit more; his tempi were generally strict, with the consequence that intimate moments could have lingered longer, and climaxes did not fully reach their peak. After the soaring opening theme of the Pilgrims’ Chorus wended its way from solo clarinet to strings to unison trombones and back to clarinet, the lively bacchanalia that fills out the balance of the work maintained the same relentless intensity for long stretches.