Underrated Classical Musicians 2/19/20

A good musical friend and I were talking last night about Das Rheingold, which is one of those Wagner works that you really have to buy what Wagner's selling to love it. It is the ultimate in Wagner's 'inhuman' side, an opera full of gods and giants and dwarves and mermaids is rather difficult for the average human being to relate to, all of whom seem to indulge in lots of ambling, often seemingly pointless conversations. 

And yet, when he mentioned his view that Wagner's Rheingold begins as comedy and ends as tragedy, a key was unlocked in my mind. Das Rheingold will never be a barrel of laughs, but for much of the first hour, the spirits are Rossini-level high, which makes the tragedy all the more shocking. Most performances, with their slow tempos and huge voices, emphasize the music's mythic dimensions, which almost inevitably distend the attention span to dimensions they're not supposed to reach. 

As evidence, he linked me to the early-80s recording conducted by Marek Janowski, one of those self-effacing German conductors who knows his craft so well and has been around for so long that everybody takes his excellence for granted. Earlier this year, I heard Janowski conduct Bruckner with the National Symphony in Washington, and it was excellent, but if you asked me to name a distinguishing feature about it, nearly all I could recall about the performance was that it was faster than usual....

In the early 80s, Janowski recorded a Ring Cycle that was rumored to originally be a project meant for none other than Carlos Kleiber. This is a completely different Wagner than we're generally accustomed to - much much closer to the world of early-19th century than the fin de siécle. It often seems as though Wagner is the only composer who sprung fully-formed from his head without any historical precedent, but that's because Wagner's influence on music is so overwhelming that it's impossible to hear his music without his own shadow cast over it. The more you remove the grandiloquence and bombast, the closer Wagner gets to Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, even Rossini.

This is just one of dozens of excellent Janowski recordings. I'm particularly fond of the Brahms cycle he did in Pittsburgh while being their principal guest in the mid 2000s. While he refuses to conduct opera anymore (that's a can of worms we won't get into...), I believe recently recorded (in many cases re-recorded) all the Wagner operas over the course of a single year. I haven't heard any of them yet, but if the recordings are anything like this, they could change your view of Wagner entirely.