Recorded at Bayreuth in 1928 by English Columbia, this was the first attempt to get a complete Wagner opera onto discs. In fact, it’s hardly complete. There are two big chunks missing from the first act (strange), four smaller ones from the second (not nearly as jarring), and the third act is cut by more than half–an unacceptable solution, since we never even get to hear Tristan die. (As if to make up for this, Naxos has included 40 minutes of Act 3 made by HMV in 1927 on three different occasions, with three different conductors and three different Kurwenals, but with the very impressive Tristan and Isolde of Walter Widdop and Gota Ljungberg.)
But what we get of the Columbia set is absorbing nonetheless: Anny Helm, a soprano Brangaene, is remarkably intense; Rudolf Bockelmann’s Kurwenal is rough-edged but valid; and Ivar Andresen’s King Mark is the soul of understated sadness and disappointment. The two leads are odder. Gunnar Graarud’s Tristan seems made for recording; I can’t imagine a voice this lyric and narrow, albeit handsome, carrying over a Wagnerian orchestra in a large opera house. Similarly, Nanny Larsen-Todsen’s sound is slim, if laser-focused and at times vibrato-free. The voice is secure and her involvement and attention to the text are never in doubt–but her style is somewhat Italianate, with slides up to and around notes that we’re unaccustomed to in Wagner.
Karl Elmendorff’s leadership can momentarily make us feel as if the opera is not a set of excerpts, and the orchestra/voice balance is amazingly good; the transfers are probably as fine as possible. On the final CD, after the third-act excerpts from 1927, scholar Ernest Newman discusses and illustrates some of the Leitmotifs from the opera–a very worthwhile bonus. This, then, is for collectors and specialists; the rest can stick to Flagstad (EMI) and/or Nilsson (Philips).
