This seven-CD box gathers together the complete orchestral music of Wagner’s hapless son Siegfried, an amiable composer of modest gifts who spent his life like a herring trapped between two barracudas: his strong-willed, mean-spirited, mother Cosima and his Nazi-sympathizing wife Winifred. Cursed with an impossible legacy in the form of his father’s own work, Siegfried lacked the spine to turn his back on the past and write music without inhibition in the forms that best suited him. And who can blame him? We can only imagine what it must have been like for him to write a grand, exuberant work like the Symphony in C only to have everyone around him deny that the work even existed because the great Richard had declared that the symphony was “dead.”
The four discs of overtures, the symphonic poems, and the concertos also demonstrate an enthusiasm for symphonic composition, and had he not felt impelled to churn out one opera after another, Wagner, Jr. might very well have become a significant musical voice after all. Of course, the jury’s out on the stage works until a representative sample see the light of day in carefully prepared performances and recordings, but as far as conservative, German late Romantics go, you could certainly do worse (Pfitzner, for example). Whether you want seven discs of this stuff, on the other hand, is another question entirely. Start with the vibrantly Brucknerian Symphony in C, and then try the first volume of Overtures, which are symphonic poems in all but name (especially the sixteen minute prelude to Die heilige Linde). If you’re hooked, you can continue to explore one disc at a time. Werner Andreas Albert plays this music with his typical consistency and commitment, and the sound is very good. A low-risk proposition for the mildly adventurous. [1/31/2001]
