Karl Muck’s generally straightforward, fleet, and lightly textured Wagner conducting will strike today’s listeners as remarkably modern for a musician born in 1859. Compare for instance his 1929 Siegfried Idyll to Bruno Walter’s British recording from the following year. Walter imbues the music with a wider degree of tempo fluctuation and string portamento, while Muck, by contrast, seems to hold his players in relatively expressive check. Muck also takes trouble to differentiate soft dynamic levels, as you readily hear at the outset of the Tristan and Tannhäuser preludes–yet he doesn’t throw himself into the music’s throbbing momentum. Incidentally, both Muck and Klemperer recorded the Tristan prelude with Wagner’s rarely-heard concert ending. What’s interesting is that the Berlin State Opera Orchestra plays more precisely, passionately, and in tune for Klemperer in 1927 than for Muck in 1928. Indeed, the orchestra’s shortcomings (flustered brass and homely solo winds, for example) are difficult to endure and don’t come within spitting distance of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s contemporaneous Wagner recordings under Stokowski’s more volatile leadership.
That said, Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers count among his finest restoration work, and sonically surpass the VAI label’s Wagner/Muck edition (I have not heard the APR Muck disc). In fact, the Meistersinger Act 1 Prelude sounds more detailed and vibrant here than in Obert-Thorn’s transfer for Pearl’s 1998 Wagner Conductors on Record anthology. In sum, this is a release geared more to specialists than to general listeners. However, those curious about Karl Muck’s Wagner should start with his excellent Parsifal Act 3, also available from Naxos.
