Wagner’s three in one? No, the 40-minute sequence that filled the second half of this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert was not some late meditation on the Holy Trinity by the composer of Parsifal but, rather, a suite created by the conductor Thomas Guggeis by stringing together the Overture and Venusberg Music from Tannhäuser, the Prelude to Act 1 of Lohengrin and the Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The continuous nature of this fusion had not been trailed beforehand (the programme listed the three works separately), and some will surely have frowned at the sheer conceit of playing this segue game. How dare a debutant upstart mess with Wagner!
The young German’s riposte to such indignation was, simply, the persuasive execution and outcome of his idea. It convinced at every level and the pieces slotted together like a well-made puzzle into a symphonic traversal of Wagner through the years. The Meistersinger Overture is an epic at the best of times, but as the climactic tranche of a lengthy suite it was thrilling beyond measure. The intricacies of all three scores were brilliantly served by a London Philharmonic at the top of its game (where it has been for a good while now), from the killer horns that opened Tannhäuser through the ping-pong interplay of violas and flutes, to the jocular to-and-fro between the LPO’s leader and co-leader – until the orchestration thickened into a carnival: unbuttoned, unbridled and a riot of colour.
An hour or so earlier the concert had opened with the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, an account of this seraphic music that Guggeis crafted with such impeccable taste that even his silences sang. Wagner’s emotionally loaded crescendos emerged not just louder but richer in amplitude than the preceding notes. The missing factor in all this beauty was passion, particularly in this orchestra-only version of the Liebestod. The legacy of a bewitched love that cannot be fulfilled and a lust that can never be assuaged was absent from this reading, and so the finality of the ‘love-death’ lacked a tragic context beyond the notes themselves, beautiful though these were.
The LPO’s selling point for this concert by a youthful conductor on his UK debut was not Wagner but Richard Strauss – more specifically ‘Renée Fleming sings Strauss’ as the publicity ran, a little misleadingly. Top of the billing, if not top of the bill, the great American diva still sounded as bespangled as her sparkling gown (Fleming’s jeweller was given her own credit in the programme).
The Four Last Songs have long held a special place in the diva’s repertoire and now in her mid-60s, she still had their measure. The soprano articulated the half-light of Frühling with a lilting evenness of tone, eschewed all temptation to histrionics in September and shared Beim Schlafengehen with Peter Schoeman’s equally expressive violin. Her diction throughout was unimpeachable, while Im Abendrot with its allusions to Death and Transfiguration (and, by extension perhaps, to Isolde’s Liebestod) shone with the burnished colours of sunset. Fleming sang Strauss’s popular Morgen! (In the morning) as her encore, but this listener scarcely heard it – too wrapped up and rapt in the warmth of that evening magic.
