Trisolde

So Kirill Petrenko's Trisolde with Kauffmann and Harteros has garnered better reviews than any opera performance since... the Boulez/Chereau House of the Dead? It's talked about as an instant legend.

Perhaps it is, but as much as I love Kirill Petrenko, that kind of love and care on Tristan is wasted on many of us. Some of us are just not Wagnerians, and when we hear Wagner, we hear Wagner we hear trashy melodrama with intellectual pretensions toward philosophical ideas that the composer clearly doesn't understand. The control and detail of Petrenko is extraordinary - too extraordinary if anything. This is a conductor who takes Tristan very seriously indeed, and if any score demands chaotic abandon, it's Tristan.

Tristan works as exactly two things: opera, and music. And like all over-the-top works, it demands that whatever your approach, you go all the way into it. If you're doing it as opera, you have to dramatize it in every way. You can't do it as Bohm does that rushes through all the introspective passages. You can't go out of your way to point up subtle detail the way C. Kleiber does. And you can't do it as Furtwangler does it (in the studio) with no reaching for the jugular vein in the dramatic moments - personally I find WF's 1947 Acts II and III from the Berlin Staatsoper is more exciting than the famous recording, I may be alone on this hill but I'll happily stay on it.

There are a number of very good 'operatic' Tristans. Rattle's recent Tristans are often delirious potions, so are Barenboim's - particularly his earler performances with Bayreuth and the Berlin Philharmonc. And of course, Artur Bodanzky with the miracle that was the 'Old Met' along with Flagstad and Melchior. But as great as the Old Met was, I can't escape the impression that the best of the 'operatic' Tristans, in my never humble opinion, is de Sabata. The sound is of course terrible, but the over the top, sheer manic energy is so in keeping with the opera's delerium, and because he can relax in the quiet moments, the passionate outbursts explode in a way they can't in Bohm's reading. There is no performance quite like it in the catalogue. Grob-Prandl and Lorenz sound as though de Sabata inflamed them. There's an old orchestral musician with the London Philharmonic who used to have a blog, and he said that de Sabata was the greatest conductor he'd ever played under - including Furtwangler and Bruno Walter.

The other option is to do Tristan as pure music, you have to do it with absolute rock-solid musical integrity as though you're conducting a Beethoven symphony. It has to be solid as a rock with no extraneous effects, just a score in which every detail is inevitable and adds to the complete tapestry. You can't make everything into a plaster cast of euphonous sound as Karajan does. You can't slow everything down to a crawl as Bernstein does. , and unlike Beecham's famous recording with Reiner's performance providing the missing, you need one conductor all the way with a unified conception and personality. Abbado seems to get close in 1998 Berlin (why was there no recording?), and Erich Kleiber certainly had great passages in 1952 Munich.

But there are two that I think do it, but only one in decent sound. Ferdinand Leitner seems to do it in 1959 with the Concertgebouw, but the singers are so closely mic'd that you often can't hear anything meaningful from the orchestra over Vinay and Modl, even at the climaxes - I find that far more distracting than de Sabata's ultra-compressed sound, particularly for an approach like this in which detail is so crucial. What a shame, it's a perfectly paced Tristan with one of the world's greatest orchestras.

The other is the very young Wolfgang Sawallisch, in 1957 Bayreuth. If we had a Tristan from Klemperer or Horenstein, I'm sure this is what it would be like. Every detail rings true, every detail breathes, the dynamic range is enormous, Nilsson and Windgassen are inspired and Sawallisch reels them in from melodrama. It is an incredibly underrated version from one of the most underrated and insightful conductors of the 20th century. If you haven't heard it, you're in for a great treat.

Leitner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQiFoE1t0yE

Sawallisch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ZiHl1CKeM

de Sabata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9rbxN6h9Ww