Ten years on from his death, this newly released stay recording from the 1999 Styriarte festival in Graz is a welcome reminder of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s revolutionary formula to music. At its coronary heart is a uncommon – for him – foray into the enviornment of Richard Wagner, provocatively coupled with Mendelssohn and Schumann, two composers whose attitudes in direction of the Sorcerer of Bayreuth had been equivocal, to recount the least.

He opens with Mendelssohn’s fairytale overture, Die Schöne Melusine, a bracing scamper pushed by resolute strings and dramatic interventions from the woodwind. The Tannhäuser Overture is extremely a special topic. To a obvious extent, Harnoncourt takes a Wagner-lite formula, with gossamer textures rooted in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Evening’s Dream Overture, a comparison that the antisemitic Wagner would with no doubt enjoy loathed. Purists might well well flinch, nonetheless it with no doubt’s one in every of the silkiest and most detailed of readings, for those unusual in regards to the staunch notes on the page, it’s illuminating.

The Tristan Prelude is in a same vein, in particular its weightless opening, nonetheless while Harnoncourt scrapes the historical barnacles from Wagner’s radical harmonies, he never skimps on the music’s emotional thrust. It’s topped by Violeta Urmana – positive, a mezzo-soprano – in a breathtaking story of the Liebestod. No longer supreme is her tone luxurious, nonetheless every note is sublimely positive.

Schumann’s infrequently ever carried out Requiem für Mignon, an 11-minute secular work for soloists, choir and orchestra on subject issues of agonize and solace, rounds the concert off favorite. The music is interspersed with Harnoncourt’s erudite commentaries, including a share-by-share clutch on Mendelssohn’s overture. Thoroughly enlightening, assuming you enlighten German.

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