Nicholas Kenyon 

Wagner: Götterdämmerung, Die Meistersinger, Siegfried Idyll – review

Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra make a revelatory contribution to the Wagner bicentenary celebrations, writes Nicholas Kenyon
  
  


Ivan Fischer brings his forensic skills, which have been so illuminating in Mahler and Stravinsky, to bear on Wagner's orchestral music, and the result is a revelatory contribution to the bicentenary celebrations. Transparent and lithe, the Meistersinger prelude clocks in at under 10 minutes but lacks nothing in sonorous weight. In the lovely Siegfried Idyll, Fischer draws a floating, dancing sound from his Budapest strings with a plangent solo clarinet. In the Götterdämmerung extracts, Petra Lang is maybe not a natural Brünnhilde but laser-sharp in the immolation scene, while Siegfried's funeral march is hard-edged, incisive, its climax absolutely shattering: really distinctive playing.

 

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